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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > History of ideas, intellectual history
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The Prisoner's Philosophy - Life and Death in Boethius's Consolation (Paperback)
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The Prisoner's Philosophy - Life and Death in Boethius's Consolation (Paperback)
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The Roman philosopher Boethius (c. 480-524) is best known for the
Consolation of Philosophy, one of the most frequently cited texts
in medieval literature. In the Consolation, 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 the
Consolation is 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. In The Prisoner's
Philosophy, Joel C. Relihan delivers a genuinely new reading of the
Consolation. 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's Confessions and Soliloquies as 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 the Consolation: an ironic
retelling of Plato's Crito, an adaptation of Lucian's Jupiter
Confutatus, and a sober reduction of Job to 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 knowledge. Philosophy's attempt to lead an exile to God's
heaven is rejected; the exile comes to accept the value of the
phenomenal world, and theology replaces philosophy to explain the
place of human beings in the order of the world. Boethius
Christianizes the genre of Menippean satire, and his Consolation is
a work about humility and prayer.
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