The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  The learned Cassidorus, Theodoric’s secretary of state, acclaimed the twenty-five-year-old Boethius. “In your translations, Pythagoras the musician, Ptolemy the astronomer, Nicomachus the arithmetician, Euclid the geometer are read by Italians, while Plato the theologian and Aristotle the logician dispute in Roman voice; and you have given back the mechanician Archimedes in Latin to the Sicilians.” As a young man, Boethius announced his lifetime project to “instruct the manners of our State with the arts of Greek wisdom.”

  It was Boethius’s fatal fall from royal favor, in the very model of an Aristotelian tragic hero, that made him creator of the solacing classic of later centuries. Personal disaster, the isolation of prison, and separation from his books would stir a new vision all his own. And he managed to translate and transform the subtleties of Plato and Aristotle into a popular philosophy. Boethius’s personal tragedy was a symptom of the uncertainties of the age, the rivalries between the Eastern and the Western empires. Theodoric the Great was at first spectacularly successful in fostering a productive coexistence between the Goths and the Romans. Declaring all (including his Gothic tribesmen) subject to the Roman law, he insisted on tolerance of the orthodox Catholics and safety for the defenseless Jews. But the healing of the schism between the Churches of East and West fed Theodoric’s fears that his Italian subjects would renounce his rule in favor of the Eastern Orthodox emperor. When the Roman senator Albinus was accused of writing treasonous letters to the emperor Justin, Boethius impulsively protested, “The senate and myself are all guilty of the same crime. If we are innocent, Albinus is equally entitled to the protection of the laws.” The uneasy Theodoric, taking this to be a confession of guilt, had it confirmed by a forged letter from Boethius to the Eastern emperor and arrested Boethius on suspicion of high treason.

  The imprisonment that provided his unwelcome sabbatical from official duties forced Boethius to concentrate on questions of fate and destiny. And his enduring work, The Consolation of Philosophy, was the creation of these last two miserable years of Boethius’s life. Gibbon, always hostile to metaphysics, found it “a golden volume … which claims incomparable merit from the barbarism of the times and the situation of the author.” In his prison cell and without his library, Boethius had to depend on his well-cultivated memory, the prime resource of scholars in the days before the printing press. If Boethius had been surrounded by his books he could hardly have written so concise or so popular a work. After the Latin Bible, his was perhaps the most widely read book of the European Middle Ages.

  At first Boethius’s little one-hundred-page volume with its alternate brief passages of prose and verse has the look of a mere collection of writings by others. But all is really Boethius’s creation, an anthology of his own poignant classical memories. Nam in omni adversitate fortunae infelicissimum genus est infortunii, fuisse felicem (For in every ill-turn of fortune the most unhappy sort of misfortune is to have been happy). In these few pages his vast reading in ancient philosophers had been refined, embellished, and simplified. The goddess Philosophy, Boethius’s interlocutor, leads us in dramatic dialogue from self-pity through “the gentler remedy” (understanding the whims of Fortune) to “the stronger remedy” (discounting the earthly goods which depend on Fortune). Man’s sin is mere forgetfulness, the clouded memory of the soul. For, as Plato explained, before birth every soul is pure, committed to the Good. Philosophy restores that memory. But how can evil exist in a world where God is Good and history is governed by God’s Providence? The everyday errancy of Fate does not disrupt the divine scheme of God, the “still point of the turning world.” The closer we come to that central point, retreating from the rotating changefulness of the world, the freer we too will be. Love holds us all together and helps each of us recover the memory of our pristine soul.

  But if everything is foreordained by God, how can we be free to choose? Philosophy, the consoling goddess, distinguishes God’s way of knowing from man’s, which comes down to their different relation to time. The mind of the eternal God “embraces the whole of everlasting life in one simultaneous present.” “Whatever lives in time exists in the present and progresses from the past to the future, and there is nothing set in time which can embrace simultaneously the whole extent of its life: it is in the position of not yet possessing tomorrow when it has already lost yesterday. In this life of today you do not live more fully than in that fleeting and transitory moment.” This explains why God’s foreknowledge does not deny man’s moral responsibility. The Consolation of Philosophy is prison literature. And the pious prisoner must somehow “justify the ways of God to Man.” He cannot escape the problem of theodicy, of how a benevolent God could tolerate evil. This would also trouble other prison authors, Sir Thomas More writing his Dialogue of Comfort agaynst Trybulacion (1534) and John Bunyan at his Pilgrim’s Progress (1676).

  For the generations who could not read Greek and had lost contact with the wisdom of the ancients the form and style of Boethius’s Consolation gave help. Though closely reasoned, its brief chapters alternating prose and verse encouraged the casual reader. The dialogue between the optimistic Mistress Philosophy and the disconsolate prisoner carries along the troubled layman.

  The book that was destined to be the classic of the Christian Middle Ages was not clearly the work of a Christian, although few of its notions are un-Christian. Boethius would have us “offer up humble prayers” to a personal God, “a judge who sees all things,” but he offers no distinctly Christian doctrine, nor does he quote the Bible. He lived up to the promise of his title, “The Consolation of Philosophy,” by helping every lonely prisoner reach God through his own reason.

  Impatient with theology, Gibbon admired Boethius, for “the sage who could artfully combine in the same work the various riches of philosophy, poetry, and eloquence, must already have possessed the intrepid calmness which he affected to seek. Suspense, the worst of evils, was at length determined by the ministers of death.… A strong cord was fastened round the head of Boethius and forcibly tightened, till his eyes almost started from their sockets; and some mercy may be discovered in the milder torture of beating him with clubs till he expired. But his genius survived to diffuse a ray of knowledge over the darkest ages of the Latin world.…”

  Later generations paid homage to Boethius, and his work enjoyed a rich and varied afterlife. Master translator Boethius would eventually himself benefit from the most eminent and adept translators. King Alfred the Great (849–899) did a free version of the Consolation into Anglo-Saxon with his own explanatory comments, and he made Boethius one of his golden four of “the books most necessary for all men to know.” In the next century a Swiss Benedictine at the monastery of St. Gall put the book into Old High German. Someone translated it into Provençal. Jean de Meung, the thirteenth-century author of the second part of Le Roman de la Rose, put the whole Consolation into French. This was probably the version that attracted Chaucer to translate the Consolation into English prose and to embroider Boethius’s philosophy into the poetry of “The Knight’s Tale” and Troilus and Criseyde. Dante placed Boethius among the twelve lights in the heaven of the Sun:

  That joy who strips the world’s hypocrisies

  Bare to whoever heeds his cogent phrases:

  Chaucer’s was only the first of many efforts at “Englishing” the Consolation. The most famous and most remarkable was that by Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603). In 1593, desolate at the news that the Protestant leader Henry of Navarre (1553–1610) had forsaken the Protestant cause and taken up the Catholic faith at St.-Denis, she tried to allay her “great grief” by reading the Bible and the Holy Fathers and by frequent conferences with the archbishop. Then she solaced herself daily by translating Boethius, and shamed sluggish scholars by finishing one page every half hour. She wrote the verses in her own hand, but dictated the prose to her secretary, and completed the whole Consolation in something between twenty-four and twenty-seven hours. Scholars agree that she managed to retain the dignity of the
Latin original with a certain “ragged splendour.”

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  The Music of the Word

  BOETHIUS’S textbook on music (c.505), along with his Consolation of Philosophy, solaced generations with the harmony of the universe. Drawing on Pythagoras, Plato, and Nicomachus—whom he had translated and with whom he would be depicted in medieval drawings—he helped the great Greeks provide the mathematical basis for musical theory in the West.

  And he perpetuated their grandiose concept of music. Boethius explained that “music is associated not only with speculation but with morality as well.… The soul of the universe was joined together according to musical concord.” Studying the universal concord, the musicus was a cosmologist. His relation to the composer or singer or player of music was like that of the architect to the bricklayer. Or, as Guido of Arezzo put it (c.1000), “he who makes and composes music is defined as a beast because he does not understand.” Boethius’s treatise spared no detail of the Greek theories and concluded with Ptolemy’s own theory of the divisions of the tetrachord. Despite or because of its technicality, Boethius’s work survived in 137 manuscripts, becoming one of the first musical works to go into print (Venice, 1491–92).

  Christianity, conquering European culture in the Middle Ages, inherited this heavy baggage of musical theory. The “music of the spheres,” a pagan notion, still appealed, and the Pythagorean belief in numbers satisfied the need for symbols. Was it not exhilarating that the seven notes of the scale expressed the pitches produced by the revolving of the seven planetary spheres? And that the number 7 also had a special meaning for man, since his earthly body was symbolized by the number 4 and his soul by 3. This Homo quadratus, the properly proportioned man, was described by the architect Villard de Honnecourt and depicted in a famous diagram by Leonardo da Vinci. Greek theories of monophonic music cast thinking about music in this appealing mold of Pythagorean numbers.

  The Christian churches needed liturgy, which meant thinking of music not as numbers but as sound. The music of the word would be a way station from cosmology. Saint Paul had exhorted the faithful to sing and make melody in “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” The first record of Christian worship had been the hymn sung at the institution of the Lord’s Supper (Mark 14:26).

  When the early churches first admitted music, they recalled classic warnings against the wrong sort of music. In his Confessions Saint Augustine described the perils. While the Church songs moved him to tears at his conversion, he was “moved not with the singing, but with the thing sung”:

  I then acknowledge the great good use of this institution.… that so by the delight taken in at the ears, the weaker minds be roused up into some feeling of devotion. And yet again, so oft as it befalls me to be moved with the voice rather than with the ditty, I confess myself to have grievously offended: at which time I wish rather not to have heard the music.

  (Translated by William Watts)

  He recalled how in Milan the music of his mentor Saint Ambrose had affected him. “How did I weep, in Thy Hymns and Canticles.… voices flowed into mine ears, and the Truth distilled into my heart, whence the affections of my devotion overflowed, and tears ran down, and happy was I therein.”

  Ambrose, the defender of the faith against the Arian heresies from Alexandria, had embellished the Milanese services on the Oriental model by prescribing music for the church festivals and introducing the antiphonal singing of the Psalms. So he created the Christian hymn. At least four of the hymns he wrote still survive and he became the legendary author of many more. The singing of hymns then became part of the Rule of Benedict for the canonical hours. The famous Te Deum, the Ambrosian Hymn of Praise, was said to have been composed responsively and spontaneously at the baptism of Augustine. When Ambrose began singing “Te Deum Laudamus,” Augustine replied, “Te Dominum confitemur,” and Ambrose continued with the words that became the hymn. In his cathedral in Milan, Bishop Ambrose introduced metrical hymns that were widely imitated across the West, and his four-line stanzas of iambic dimeter came to be known as Ambrosiani.

  The liturgy of the Catholic services, the Music of the Word, would become the main vehicle of the art of music in the West during the next centuries. Ambrose’s own form of the chant would retain its character and remain a Milanese liturgy into modern times. Saint Augustine’s treatise focused on how rhythm and meter were applied to “long and short noises, including syllables, spoken or sung.”

  The Gregorian chant, fertile creation of the medieval church, would be the enduring monument in the West of monophonic music—that is, music that consists of a single line or melody without any accompaniment as part of the work. This first Christian music would bear the name of Saint Gregory the Great (c. 540–604; pope, 590–604), who deserves to be known as its compiler and promoter. The Christianizing of music, however, limited the independence of music, along with that of poetry, philosophy, and architecture.

  Gregory himself was both the symbol and the agent of the new Europe-wide power of the Church and especially of the papacy. In the struggles between the Eastern and Western Roman empires and between Roman and barbarian, of which Boethius had been a victim, Gregory would play a leading role. Born in Rome in 540, only sixteen years after the death of Boethius, Gregory came of a wealthy family that had already produced other popes. He received a good classical education, was at home in Latin but did not know Greek. After the Lombard invasions he became praefectus urbis, chief administrator of Rome at the age of thirty-two.

  When Gregory gave up the government of the turbulent city, he retreated to the peace and piety of the monastery. He made his own home on the Coelian hill into a Benedictine monastery of St. Andrew, and he gave away his large landed inheritance to establish a half-dozen other monasteries. In 579 Pelagius II sent him as papal nuncio to Constantinople, where for seven years he sought reinforcements against the barbarian Lombards. Soon after he returned to Rome, the plague carried away the pope. And in 590, according to the custom of the time, the Senate, clergy, and people of Rome chose him pope by acclamation. The unwilling Gregory still had to be confirmed by the emperor in Constantinople, to whom his name was sent. Committed to the monastic life, Gregory wrote to Emperor Maurice begging him not to confirm the election, but the letter was intercepted. Gregory fled the city but was captured after three days and had the papacy imposed on him. Still complaining of “the lowly height of external advancement,” and pleading to remain a monk, he finally “undertook the burden of the dignity with a sick heart,” and was “so stricken with sorrow that he could scarcely speak.”

  Never was reluctant power exercised more effectively. Gregory became the architect of the medieval papacy, the people’s pope, and purifier of the Church. He seized the opportunity of the Lombard invasions and the impotence of the Byzantine exarch in Ravenna to extend the Church’s power over thought, culture, and morals. An effective administrator, he gave the Church a coherence that survived through the Middle Ages. The Napoleon of the papacy, master of Machiavellian politics, he used the turbulence of the Byzantine empire, the struggles between the Eastern and Western churches, and the influx of barbarian tribes to make the papacy supreme in Western Christendom. In 596 he sent forty monks to England with the Augustine (died 604) known as Apostle to the English, who became the first archbishop of Canterbury. Borrowing from the earlier Augustine, Gregory conferred on himself the title Servant of God’s Servants, and was canonized by popular acclaim. In the eighth century he was named one of the doctors of the Church, the last of the Latin fathers.

  Just as the most enduring of the versatile Napoleon’s achievements was not his empire but the Napoleonic Code, so the most enduring achievement of Gregory the Great would be the Gregorian chant. And just as Napoleon was not the author of his code, so Gregory did not compose the Gregorian chants. He did write a vast work on Job and on other books of the Bible, and issued a widely used Pastoral Rule. But, as he cautioned Augustine of Canterbury, he was wary of an imposed uniformity. His
concern was unity in Christian faith, and his musical scheme for the Roman service laid a foundation for the music of the West. Out of the Gregorian chant, a renaissance of the monophonic music inherited from the ancients, Western polyphony would grow.

  Christianity had set the stage for Gregory’s leadership and the creation of this wonderfully fertile Music of the Word. The fear of graven images (Exodus 20:4,5) at first had excluded the pictorial arts from the churches, for the faithful remembered the wrath of Saint Paul on seeing statues in the Greek temples. “Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device” (Acts:17:16–17, 23–24, 29). But music was part of the Christian service from the beginning. Since the first Christians were Jews, they naturally borrowed and adapted the music of the Hebrew divine service. That service featured singing the Psalms of David in either responses or antiphony. New Christian congregations made psalm singing a part of their service that would survive in the Gregorian chants. But since the ancient Hebrews had no musical notation, their melodies for recitation were preserved only by memory. Their accents for cantillation became the “neumes,” the original notation for medieval Christian music. So the early Church music combined the inheritances of Jewish temple music with ancient Greek musical theory.