The issue of a revised edition of the translation of The Consolation of Philosophy has enabled me to correct mistakes, improve the wording of one or two passages and take account of recent work on Boethius and his age. Since the first edition several important books have appeared. The commemoration of the fifteenth centenary of his birth in 1980 saw the appearance of two major contributions, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology and Philosophy by Henry Chadwick, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1981, and Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, a collection of studies edited by Margaret Gibson, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1981, including a fine literary analysis of the Consolation by Anna Crabbe. Boethius’s literary structure and methods have also been exhaustively examined in J. Gruber’s ‘Kommentar zu Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae’, Texte und Kommentare 9, Berlin 1978, Seth Lerer’s Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in The Consolation of Philosophy, Princeton, New Jersey 1985, and Gerard O’Daly’s The Poetry of Boethius, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press 1991, and his antecedents and influence by Pierre Courcelle in La consolation de philosophie dans la tradition littèraire, Paris 1976, in his article on Boethius in the Dictionnaire de Lettres françcaises, Le moyen âge, Paris 1964, and in Jamie Scott’s Christians and Tyrants: the prison testimonies of Boethius, Thomas More, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, New York 1995. Notable also are the entries on Boethius by L. Minio-Paluello in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1968) and the Dictionary of Scientific Biography II, New York 1970 and the articles by S. F. Wiltshire, ‘Boethius and the Summum Bonum’ in The Classical Journal 67, 1972, and C. J. De Vogel ‘The problem of philosophy and Christian faith in Boethius’ in Romanitas et Christianitas: Studia J. H. Waszink, Amsterdam 1973.
Our understanding of the relationship between Christianity and the pagan cultural background of the sixth century has become clearer since Henry Chadwick drew attention to the long tradition of Christian humanism which lies behind the Consolation. The link between the great senatorial families and the higher clergy in Rome was close, and so far from conversion entailing the rejection of pagan antiquity and custom it seems to have brought with it a positive attitude to the literature and thought of antiquity. Indeed, apart from the study of pagan philosophy, the editorial attention paid to classical authors such as Virgil and Horace and the care and restoration of ancient buildings, even originally pagan festivals such as the Luper-calia and the July games at Rome in honour of Apollo continued to be fully celebrated in Boethius’s time. As Chadwick makes clear, this ‘Christian love of the past, even when associated with some of the external forms of pagan ceremony, is of some importance as background for estimating the position of Boethius and his circle between classical culture and Christian belief’.1 This absence of tension between pagan and Christian tradition was able to foster a milieu in which the concept of the twofold approach to truth, one via the exercise of the reason, one via revelation, was natural and easy to maintain. The study of natural theology was in this context as valid as the study of revealed theology and it was to the former that throughout his life Boethius had devoted his formidable intellectual powers.
There is further a personal circumstance pointed out by Anna Crabbe which seems to go far to account for the absence of overt Christian reference in the Consolation. In contrast to Augustine, to whom it is now clear Boethius’s indebtedness was profound,2 the son of a pagan father, who came to conversion only as the result of passionate intellectual searching and painful emotional struggle, and whose work as a result shows a deep personal relationship with the God he discovered, Boethius was born into a Christian family, faced no such emotional turmoil or intellectual challenge and was able to devote his powers not to the discovery of a new religion but to the logical exposition of the theology that underpinned it. In the prison house during the last months of his life, so far from disillusion or apostasy, what he achieved was a brilliant summation of the moral and protreptic lessons of his life’s intellectual work, in argument largely non-technical, adorned by literary and philosophical allusion drawn from a mind over many years immersed in the great writers of the classical past.