Saint Augustine (354–430 CE) shown in a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript. At his feet, lying prostrate, is Aristotle, who had asserted, contrary to Christian doctrine, that the universe was immortal. The inscription is from Aristotle’s Physics: “We conclude the world is immortal, having neither a beginning nor an end.”
“Understanding is the reward of faith,” Saint Augustine says. “I believe, in order that I may understand” will be the catchphrase of the early Middle Ages. It is the summing-up of Augustine’s final authoritative fusion of Neoplatonism and Christianity. In his name, it will have a sweeping impact on Western culture for the next thousand years and beyond.40
However, there will be a price to pay for this belief that the ultimate meaning of reality can be found in our own spiritual nature. Our interest in the outside physical world, the realm of nature and science, by necessity drops to second place. What vital truths does the world of sensory experience offer us? The Augustinian Christian will answer as Plato does in the Theaetetus: None. “It is not necessary to probe into the nature of things,” Augustine will write, “as was done by those whom the Greeks called physicists.” There is nothing there to interest the searcher after wisdom, only more shadows and gloom.*
Greek science on Aristotle’s terms, which had already fallen into decrepitude under the late Roman Empire, will take a long hiatus during the Middle Ages. For most Christians, it will be enough to mark down the material world as simply one more part of God’s creation and the Great Chain of Being. They have more important things to think about, including discovering their place in the age to come.
For the future belongs to the Heavenly City, the republic founded by Christ. It will bear little relation to the one proposed by Plato. However, it achieves the same goals Plato sought, because at its foundation are the ultimate truths of God. It is where “there shall be no evil things; where no good thing shall be hidden, where we shall have leisure to utter the praises of God, which shall be all things in all!”41
Instead of justice for the few, it will offer justice to all human beings, men and women, masters and slaves. Instead of uniting men by power or a love of glory, it will unite them by the bonds of love, derived from love of God. Instead of the fragile liberty of the Greek polis, it provides the true liberty of the Christian soul that comes through doing God’s will and being united with Him. “For what other thing is our end, but to come to that kingdom of which there is no end?” And instead of vanishing into dust, like all earthly empires and dominions, it will live on, beyond space and time, eternal and forever.
It is important to realize that for Augustine, this Heavenly City was not the Catholic Church as he knew it, let alone the Catholic Church as it would become in the Middle Ages. Augustine’s City of God is a kind of Platonic ideal, of which Christendom can become an earthly reflection only if it strictly follows God’s word and laws and embeds them in men’s hearts. Augustine’s formula, with its conscious echoes of Plato’s Republic, remains the basis of the Western idea of a church to this day: Catholic or Protestant, Methodist or Mormon. This is the idea of the church as a community, whose members share the same values and beliefs and who are bound together in their dedication to love God as they love one another; and to serve His commands rather than those of some bureaucrat or politician.
For Augustine, all true community depends on God’s grace. Someday, perhaps Christianity and Christendom will be the same. But not yet, he said to himself, scanning the horizon from the walls of Hippo Regius. Cities and provinces in turmoil; wars and chaos everywhere. At the end of his life, Augustine watched armed Vandal tribesmen sailing into Hippo’s broad harbor to besiege and loot the town. He died in 430, four years after finishing The City of God, even as the Vandals were pounding on his city’s gates. To the congregation he left behind, the hopes of the New Jerusalem must have seemed a very long way off.
Still, Saint Augustine proved more right than wrong. When the last Roman emperor in the West was finally deposed in 476, hardly anyone noticed. A new civilization was already taking shape: not the Heavenly City exactly, but something very different from what had come before.
No one could have guessed that this new civilization would find its first intellectual hero in almost exactly the same place the ancient world had, namely in a stone-walled prison cell—or that after four centuries of Plato and his admirers dominating the conversation, he would triumphantly restore Aristotle’s place at the cultural table.
* * *
* But not number. The Neoplatonist notion derived from the Pythagoreans that numbers can be formulae for grasping the reality of being never lost its fascination for Augustine. His works would keep the Pythagorean spirit alive in medieval philosophy, where it will pop up in surprising contexts—not least of which is in the building of Chartres Cathedral. See chapter 13.
Boethius (475?–525 CE) used Aristotle to save Europe from the Dark Ages.
Twelve
INQUIRING MINDS: ARISTOTLE STRIKES BACK
Through doubting we question, and through questioning we perceive the truth.
—Peter Abelard
He was a dignified, slightly pompous man, as his full sonorous name, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, might imply. Contemporaries viewed him with awe as the last Roman. We can think of him as the first medieval man, and the man who reintroduced Aristotle to the West.
Boethius was born fifty years after Augustine’s death to an ancient Roman aristocratic clan, the Anicia. The family library was one of the wonders of Rome. Boethius was a Christian; he counted a pope as well as two emperors among his ancestors. Still, the proudest day of his life came in 522, when his two sons were elevated to the consulship, the state’s highest office, on the same day—an honor unique in the history of the ancient city.1
Two years later Boethius found himself in a prison cell, awaiting death from the same man who had granted him that signal honor, King Theodoric of the Ostrogoths. As he looked around his cell, the old senator must have smiled bitterly to himself. He should have known the bond of trust between Roman and barbarian, orthodox Catholic and Arian heretic,* would not last. When the Ostrogoths had swept into Italy, Theodoric looked for the best and brightest Roman for advice on how to govern. He turned to Boethius. For nearly two decades, Boethius had acted as Theodoric’s chief political adviser and mentor—his surrogate father, almost.
Theodoric was dazzled by Boethius’s shrewd advice, by his icy calm in times of crisis, but above all by his knowledge of Greek literature, philosophy, and science. Once when Theodoric needed a gift for a fellow barbarian king, he asked Boethius, who built him a magnificent mechanical water clock and sundial.
“In your hands Greek philosophy has become Roman doctrine,” an amazed Theodoric said through a letter composed by one of his secretaries (Theodoric himself was illiterate). Aristotle and Plato, Archimedes and Pythagoras—all had found a new home in Rome, the letter gushed, thanks to Boethius.2
However, as Aristotle had discovered with Alexander, under the outward charm of a semicivilized ruler like Theodoric lay a streak of ruthless paranoia. Their differences over religion and Arianism may have sowed the seeds of suspicion. Or Theodoric may have simply calculated that by taking out the most eminent figure from Rome’s remaining elite, he would terrify any future opposition into silence.
In any case, there were charges of a plot, and evidence was produced to implicate Boethius. Boethius could not take the charges seriously. He probably dismissed the flimsy evidence with less urgency, and fewer pleas for mercy, than he should have. Theodoric had him arrested. The barbarian then coerced the Roman Senate into finding their former colleague guilty of treason. The Senate cravenly complied. Now in the grim Ostrogothic fortress of Pavia, Boethius awaited his death sentence and the horrible tortures he knew would accompany it.
In the dungeon’s silence, Rome’s finest scholar, gaunt and white-haired, took up his pen one last time. “Fickle Fortune gave me wealth short-lived,” he wrote with a tremb
ling hand, “then in a moment all but ruined me.” What did it all mean? He was pondering this when he was suddenly aware of someone standing behind him.
Startled, he turned. Out of the surrounding gloom stepped the figure of a woman. “She was of awe-inspiring appearance,” he tells us, “her eyes burning and keen beyond the usual power of men.” Her dress was from the finest materials, although Boethius could see its color had faded and it was covered with a fine film of dust. Along the bottom hem he could barely make out an embroidered Greek letter pi and at the top the letter theta.†
Suddenly he realized who she was. She was Philosophy, “my old nurse in whose house I had been cared for since my youth.” Amazed to see her in these dismal surroundings, Boethius asked why she had come.
Philosophy answered, “To protect you and keep your strength unimpaired.” This is not the first time wisdom had been threatened by men’s evil, she added. “Before the time of my servant Plato, I fought many a great battle against the reckless forces of folly. And then in Plato’s own lifetime, his master Socrates was unjustly put to death.” Yet it had been a victorious death, because Philosophy had been at his side.
Boethius was too moved to answer. But “as she spoke she gathered her dress into a fold and wiped from my eyes the tears that filled them.” The conversation continued long into the night. Before it was over, “the night was put to flight, the darkness fled, And to my eyes their former strength returned.… The clouds of my grief dissolved and I drank in the light.”3
Boethius’s death row conversation had, of course, been imaginary. His account of it is not. It fills the pages of his Consolation of Philosophy: philosophy, we note, not Christianity. An extended allegory about the ultimate meaning of life and death, it makes references solely to ancient Greeks and Romans—not a single Christian author or figure appears in it, not even Jesus. Yet Boethius was an unshakably orthodox Catholic; he wrote numerous tracts on theology, including an influential one on Augustine’s favorite subject, the Trinity.4 The old idea that Boethius might somehow have been a cryptopagan who, faced by death, decided to cast aside any further Christian pretense will not bear up to serious scrutiny.
So Boethius’s decision to turn to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle for guidance and assurance rather than Jesus Christ in his last moments of life seems puzzling: puzzling, that is, until we realize what he was up to.
Boethius was four years old when the Roman Empire in the West ended. He grew up under the growing shadow of what we call the Dark Ages. He watched the spread of barbaric chaos, and the slow extinguishing of civilization, with deep alarm. He came to realize that Christian society by itself was not going to survive. The death of the Earthly City had led not to the creation of the Heavenly City, but to something far worse. To live in a dangerous world, people needed something more than the Bible and the Church Fathers—or the advice to simply turn the other cheek to our enemies.
Boethius is the first Christian thinker to realize that Plato and Aristotle were still indispensable to Western civilization. They still provided an essential and rational framework for dealing with the real world—and also dying in it.
Philosophy as “a preparation for death” was no moot point for Boethius. Soon after he finished the Consolation, his guards led him away. He was forced to kneel on the stone floor, and a cord was tied around his temple and across his eyes. On Theodoric’s order, the executioner wound the cord tighter and tighter until the Roman’s eyes popped loose from their sockets. Then, in unbearable agony, he was bludgeoned to death with iron rods.
Back in his cell sat the abandoned manuscript. It read:
Happy the man whose eyes once could
Perceive the shining fount of good:
Happy he whose unchecked mind
Could leave the chains of earth behind.5
The Consolation of Philosophy became an imperishable part of Boethius’s legacy to the emergent culture of the Middle Ages. During the Renaissance, his reputation fell on hard times. All the same, it was Boethius who demonstrated that Western civilization would not survive if it forgot its classical roots. He singled out three figures as summing up that vital contribution: Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates.‡ By and large, that valuation has stuck ever since.
Above all, Boethius treated Plato and Aristotle as the essential anchors of a civilized education. It’s a point of view that linked Boethius not only to the Middle Ages, which read his works with passionate devotion, but indirectly to every college and university today that still teaches what his world, and ours, call the liberal arts. Still, it is important to realize that this view of education marked a sharp break from the cultural direction toward which Augustine had pointed, with huge implications.
Augustine was a keen believer in education, too, including the seven liberal arts.6 But in his mind, all learning was directed toward a single goal: reading and analyzing the Bible and bolstering our faith. That vision of education seemed too stifling to Boethius. So did Augustine’s assertion that man’s supreme freedom was to be found in following God without fear of social or political constraints and in doing the right thing with the confidence that everything we do is in accord with His supreme all-knowing will.
To Boethius, Augustine’s “Christian liberty” grated against more ancient ideals of liberty. For one thing, it seemed to strip men of the power of free will.7 If we are going to be happy, we have to be free to act in the world, even if that means we make mistakes.
Boethius’s reassessment of the importance of freedom was not the result of living in a more settled world than Augustine’s. If anything, the sixth century had even more reason for despair. The empire in the West was gone for good; its fate was entirely in the hands of barbarian tribesmen like Theodoric. For another intelligent, educated Roman Christian, Saint Benedict, the only recourse seemed to be a complete retreat from a world grown too hostile and savage to endure. Benedict would found his monastery at Monte Cassino three years after Boethius’s death, in 527.
That same year, the emperor Justinian ordered the last pagan schools in Athens to close. After nine hundred years, Plato’s Academy had to shut its doors for good. Eighty years after that, the armies of Islam would sweep over the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, isolating Constantinople and sealing off the West from the ancient sources of its culture.
Boethius understood the dangers his civilization faced and the odds against its survival. It was to shore up those odds that he dedicated his life and scholarship. If we are going to deal with a complex and dangerous world, he believed, we had better be prepared. That means above all reading Aristotle.
It was Plato who prepared him for facing death. This was the real Plato, not the yeasty mystical concoction of the Neoplatonists. Boethius was probably the last Western thinker for nine hundred years who knew all the dialogues of Plato, not just the Timaeus, backward and forward. Of course, he also knew the Timaeus intimately and summed up its grand cosmic vision in the Consolation with approval.§
At the same time, Boethius was deeply aware of the practical, humanistic side of Plato’s thought in dialogues like the Republic, the Gorgias, and the Crito. He embraced Plato’s belief that men need wisdom in order to confront and deal with evil in this world, as well as to prepare for the next. The proof is the reverence with which he invokes the name of Socrates. Socrates, who endured death for crimes he never committed, was Boethius’s role model for obvious reasons. But Socrates had also refused to yield to the baseness and corruption around him, and his bold refusal had inspired others to follow the path to enlightenment. Life is bound to be stormy for the virtuous man, Boethius wrote, whose “chief aim in the sea of life is to displease wicked men.” In those rough waters, we want Socrates on our bridge.8
So Plato was a powerful presence in Boethius’s thought. The most famous line from his Consolation, “God is to be found in goodness itself and nowhere else,” might have been written by Plato himself. But Aristotle held a deeper interest for Boethius. With the kno
wledge of Greek steadily disappearing from western Europe, the need for a Latin version of Aristotle seemed more urgent. In fact, Boethius made it his life’s work.
“I wish to translate the whole work of Aristotle,” Boethius wrote when he turned thirty. “Everything Aristotle wrote on the difficult art of logic, on the important realm of moral experience, and on the exact comprehension of natural objects, I shall translate in the correct order.”9 Boethius never finished the mammoth project he had set for himself (prison and death also interrupted his plans to translate Plato’s dialogues). Aristotle’s writings on politics, ethics, and rhetoric, along with his central work, the Metaphysics, had to wait another six centuries before they saw the light of day in the West.10
But Boethius did manage to turn Aristotle’s main works on logic into everyday usable Latin. He also translated the commentaries on them by Plotinus’s old student Porphyry of Tyre, who showed how Aristotle’s view of logic, reason, and language fit into the larger Neoplatonist vision. Boethius rounded these off with his own set of commentaries, plus original works on logic and music theory and translations of Euclid and Ptolemy. The Consolation of Philosophy completed the set.
To appreciate the value of Boethius’s legacy to Western culture, we need to remember that for the next thousand years, everything Europeans counted as knowledge had to be copied out painstakingly by hand. In a largely illiterate society, the disappearance of a precious manuscript from fire or vandalism or official disapproval, or simply the failure to make a fresh copy, could wipe out knowledge of a subject for a generation, possibly forever.
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