For many centuries in the Middle Ages, the most influential work of philosophy was not a work by Aristotle or Plato but by someone who came almost a millennium after them. We are talking of Boethius and his book, The Consolation of Philosophy, which he wrote as a sort of prison journal just before being executed. It was to become his legacy. Boethius came from a family of early Christian converts, and counted two Roman emperors and a pope among his ancestors.
He came to the notice of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric, then ruling over the Roman empire. By the age of 30, Boethius had invented for the ruler a sundial and a water clock. Soon he rose to head the imperial bureaucracy. This was the period when Christian doctrine was still being formed and a schism arose (over the material form of Christ) in which Boethius felt ethically compelled to side against the king’s position. He was imprisoned for conspiracy in 523 AD, and tortured and executed the following year.
Thus suddenly, from fame and fortune, he goes to losing it all. His response to this is the theme of Consolation and its message is in some ways similar to that of the Buddha.
Seduces to cheat
While he contemplates his fate, Boethius writes that he is visited by a woman, who is philosophy personified. She describes the nature of destiny by likening it to a wheel of fortune, whose needle stops randomly at either reward or punishment. Or continues to rotate, swinging from one extreme to the other.
Fortune is described as a monster who seduces only to cheat and then desert the individual. And this is the very nature of fortune: if she (referred to as Lady Fortuna) were to stop spinning her wheel, she would stop being fortune. And so, Lady Philosophy says that anything which can be lost in a moment is not worth being attached to. Riches, relationships, love, career and even life itself belong to this category.
What remains then? It is knowledge and the pursuit of wisdom, which can never be taken away by fortune. Real philosophers are indifferent to their fate and do not set great store by what happens to them materially. This is broadly the message of Consolation and we can guess why it became so popular. The Buddha and the Stoics had the same message and tried to live by these principles.
I have the Penguin Black Classics edition translated by Victor Watts, whose introduction is as interesting as the work itself. The Consolation of Philosophy was so popular that it was translated by Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth, among many others. It is accepted that Greek philosophy and science survived in Europe because of the translations made by the Arabs, who took over the library of Alexandria after their conquest of Egypt around 640 AD. A century before that, Boethius had worked on classical texts and tried to keep the study of Greek philosophy popular. It is his original work though that has kept him on bookshelves across the centuries.
Aakar Patel is a columnist and translator of Urdu and Gujarati non-fiction works.
