BOETHIUS

While Augustine was the dominant philosopher of the early middle ages, one other was influential on some specific philosophical issues, namely, Boethius.

Boethius. St. Benedit and the Preservation of Ancient Learning During the Early Middle Ages

Following Augustine, original intellectual activity pretty much ceases in Western Europe. Thus, the early Middle Ages we can label a culturally bleak period. The political situation that came about after the fall of the imperial government in the four hundreds, virtually destroyed the social institutions that allowed for the transmission and preservation of Greek and Roman culture in the Mediterranean. The cities in Western Europe decline both in number and in population. They were the primary targets of barbarian attacks because most of the wealth was concentrated in them. Once Germanic kingdoms were established, civil war and banditry disrupted trade and cut off cities and communication from each other within Western Europe. The threat of attack and the decline in trade forced city dwellers to leave the city and relocate to the countryside to become farmers, herdsmen or monks. Roman schools of rhetoric and law were also lake located in the cities and supported by city government. With the fall of the cities, formal higher education disappeared as well. Educated men needed to go to rural estates or relocate to monasteries. They were able there to pass on some knowledge to the next generation, but it was difficult because of their isolation. Limited intellectual activity continued throughout the five hundreds and six hundreds and became even more restricted over time. One sign of the decline of intellectual learning was the disappearance of the knowledge of Greek. In the late empire, virtually all educated Romans were bilingual speaking both Latin and Greek. You had to know both Greek and Latin. But by the three hundred, knowledge of Greek became much more rare. Augustine, for instance, who was a very educated man of his day, knew very little Greek. The fall of the western empire, cuts off ties with the West to the Greek empire and what remained a Greek speaking world. This further contributed to the decline of Greek literacy in what had formerly been the western empire. Between 400 and 1400 we know of very few western intellectuals who are fluent in Greek. This means that the Greek learning in philosophy, science, culture, etcetera were inaccessible to intellectuals in the western world and to the extent they were accessible, they were accessible only through Latin translations. These translations were not numerous. By the end of the late Middle Ages, only one of the major works of Plato was accessible in Latin to western intellectuals. The educated men of this, perceived that the great leaning of Greece and Rome was slipping away. Thus, the main effort of intellectuals of this period, after the four hundreds, was to preserve as much as possible. A representative figure who did this, was a man named Boethius. He was a Roman, but he served as a minister for one of the Ostrogothic kings of Italy. He was finally executed for political reasons. But he knew Greek, and he set out to translate Aristotle and Plato into Latin. His death, however, prevented him from completing this project. He was only able to translate 2 basic works from Aristotle on logic. It wasn't very much, but it was the only thing that Western Europe knew about Aristotle until about the year 1200.

Another man who had great influence on the preservation of learning was Saint Benedict of Nursia. He came from a wealthy Roman family. But he eventually turned to religion. After a time, he came to live as a hermit monk. He therefore decided to build a monastery in central Italy. For his monastery he writes, rules to govern the organizations and the everyday activities of the monks. These rules were so popular and influential that they were adopted by other Western monasteries. One of the key rules was that the monks needed to keep busy all of the time to keep them from falling into sin. One such activity was to copy manuscripts. It was through the efforts of Benedictine monks that any of the great books from ancient times were preserved at all. In this work of preservation generally, so much had to be done that only the slimmest intellectual ties were maintained. To save time, men passed on books that covered the widest possible range of intellectual learning. Much of what was kept were only sort of textbooks. As such, they were very general and very elementary. They did not delve deeply into most subjects. Since these medieval scholars occupied most of their time in preservation, they had little chance for original research and original thought. They placed an unduly high value on the limited learning of texts. Despite their efforts to preserve ancient culture, the early Middle Ages became an increasingly dark age intellectually. So, what we can call the decline and fall of Rome, represented far more than just a change in government in Western Europe. It marked a significant break in the line of development of civilization in two different ways. To take the most obvious way first, adverse conditions determined that a great portion of the Greco Roman intellectual world was gone. Men in the Middle Ages generally knew less about ancient life and ancient thought than we know today. And even our knowledge is much more limited than what we would like. Just as important however, is the fact that that many of the basic assumptions of the Greeks and the Romans had been discarded or radically altered well before the Roman Empire ceased to exist.

Boethius: Universals and Divine Foreknowledge

Boethius (480-524) is best remembered for his theory of universals which set the conceptual framework for discussion on that topic throughout the middle ages. He was born in Rome to a wealthy Christian family, but soon after orphaned, he was raised by his adopting family with a great appreciation for Greek and Roman culture, at a time when Rome was ruled by barbarian kings. He was well acquainted with classical philosophy, particularly Plato, Aristotle and Neoplatonism, and his extensive knowledge made him a valuable asset to the royal government. Quickly moving up the ranks in administrative posts, his career came to an abrupt end when he was accused of treason and executed. While in prison he wrote his most influential work, The Consolation of Philosophy.

Consolatio Philosophiae

Written around the year 524, it was written during his imprisonment before his trial and execution for the crime of treason. He maintained that he was not in fact treasonous but rather the victim of treachery, while at the height of his career. The work reflects his thinking on the

Nature of evil and God (the problem of theodicy) and how happiness can be attained.

While in the work Boethius makes references to “God,” these are wholly “philosophical” and not religious. (Natural Theology rather the based on faith in scripture. No reference is made to Jesus Christ nor Christianity, etc.. God is represented as an eternal, all-knowing being and the source of all good. There is some controversy as to whether Boethius is to be rightly regarded as a “martyr for the faith.”

Boethius writes the book as a conversation between himself and Lady Philosophy.

She consoles Boethius by discussing the transitory nature of fame and wealth and contends that happiness comes from within by attaining virtue. (We see the blending of Stoicism and Platonism in a manner of Middle Platonism. No one can take away a person’s virtue thus it is always better to suffer an injustice than to do an injustice period

“When she saw that the Muses of poetry were present by my couch giving words to my lamenting, she was stirred a while; her eyes flashed fiercely as she said: “Who has suffered these seducing mummers to approach this sick man?” Never have they nursed his sorrowings with any remedies, but rather fostered them with poisonous sweets. These are they who stifle the fruit-bearing harvest of reason with the barren briars of the passions; they do not free the minds of men from disease but accustom them thereto. I would think it less grievous if your allurements drew away from me some common man like those of the vulgar herd, seeing that in such a one my labors would be harmed not at all. But this man has been nurtured in the lore of Eleatics and Academics. Away with you, sirens, seductive even to perdition, and leave him to my Muses to be cared for and healed!”

We see what will become an institutional censoring, very similar to what Plato prescribed in the Republic, of Art and all things supposed to be “beautiful” should they fall short of the “test” of true beauty This is similar to Augustine’s distinction between “Things to be Used” and “Things to be Enjoyed.” Also inherited is Plato suspicion of Theatre as Deliberate Deception.

The Problem of Universals

Boethius has the honor of being the first medieval philosopher to systematically explore the problem of universals, that is, the question of whether abstract notions such as "greenness" exist somewhere in reality or only in our minds. He got his inspiration from a brief comment about universals made by the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry:

I shall avoid investigating (a) whether genera and species [i.e., universals] are real or are situated in bare thoughts alone, (b) whether as real they are bodies or incorporeals, and (c) whether they are separated or in sensibles and have their reality in connection with them. Such business is profound, and requires another, greater investigation. [Introduction to Aristotle's Categories]

In the above passage Porphyry lists possible ways of understanding how universals might exist, and Boethius refined these into three positions. The first position is that universals such as "greenness" exist outside of our minds and even separately from bodies physical bodies such as a green tree. This is the classic position taken by Plato who held that abstract notions such as "greenness" exist in the non-physical realm of the Forms. The term for this option is "universals ante rem", Latin for "before the thing." Position two is that universals are intrinsic-or built into-physical things. For example, the universal "greenness" is found in all green individual objects, such as trees and grass. This is the view taken by Aristotle, and the term for this position is "universals in re", Latin for "in the thing." The third position is that universals exist only as concepts in the human mind, and not in any real way in the external world. We abstract them from particular things, such as when after viewing several green trees I form the mental abstraction of "greenness". The official term for this is "universals post rem", Latin for "following the thing." These three positions on universals, as laid out by Boethius, became the definitive options of further discussion on the subject by later medieval philosophers as they defended one of these positions against the others. So, which of these three views did Boethius think is right? It's not clear. He criticizes them all on various grounds, but in one of his writings he seems to go along with Aristotle and in another with Plato.

Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will

Boethius was particularly influential on one other philosophical issue that of the conflict between divine foreknowledge and free will. Again, the problem here is that if God knows what I will do before hand, then that event must happen, and I have no free will to do otherwise.

Boethius has an ingenious solution to this problem: God stands outside of time and thus knows what I will do by viewing the whole timeline at once; this does not constrain our free choices. This solution rests on a unique conception of God's attribute of eternality. Consider these two conceptions of what it means to be eternal: (1) endless existence on the timeline, and (2) existence completely outside of time. To say that God is eternal in the first sense means simply that at any point that you pick in the time line, God existed or will exist at that point. God moves through time along with me and everything else in the world. The second notion of eternality places God completely outside of the timeline and suggests that the phenomenon of time does not even apply to God. Boethius goes with this second notion of God's eternality:

"eternity is the possession of endless life, whole and perfect at a single moment" (Consolation of Philosophy, 5:6).

Once we adopt this second view of God's eternality, according to Boethius, the conflict between foreknowledge and free will disappears. God does not foresee my future actions by peeking down the timeline with a special telescope. Rather, he inspects the entire timeline at once, which includes the free will choices that I make at the moments that I make them.

Since God stands forever in an eternal present, his knowledge, also transcending all movement of time, dwells in the simplicity of its own changeless present. It embraces the whole infinite sweep of the past and of the future, contemplates all that falls within its simple cognition as if it were now taking place. And therefore, if you will carefully consider that immediate presentment whereby it discriminates all things, you will more rightly conclude that it is not foreknowledge as of something future, but knowledge of a moment that never passes....

Thus, the divine anticipation does not change the natures and properties of things, and it beholds things present before it, just as they will hereafter come to pass in time. [Ibid]

For Boethius, then, it is misleading to even call this divine "foreknowledge" since this wrongly implies that God is looking into the future. Instead, it is an "outlook" that "embraces all things as from some lofty height" (ibid). Whether Augustine would have agreed with this assessment is a point of controversy. While Augustine does refer to God's foreknowledge, he may have been doing so out of the custom of the day rather than deliberately expressing the idea that God exists eternally in time and can foresee today a yet nonexistent future.