Boethius

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was a Roman statesman, philosopher, and Christian theologian of the late fifth and early sixth centuries. He was born in Rome into the ancient and distinguished gens Anicia, a senatorial family that had produced consuls and high officials for generations. His father, Flavius Manlius Boethius, held the consulship in 487. Orphaned at a young age, he was taken into the household of Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, a leading senator, historian, and patron of letters, who oversaw his education. In an age when knowledge of Greek was rapidly fading in the Latin West, Boethius acquired a thorough command of the language and of classical philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle. He later married Symmachus's daughter Rusticiana; the couple had two sons, who were named joint consuls in 522.

Boethius rose to the highest offices of the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy under King Theodoric. He was appointed consul in 510 without a colleague, a mark of exceptional honor, and later served as magister officiorum, head of the civil administration. He used his position and his learning to pursue an ambitious intellectual program: to translate the complete works of Aristotle and Plato into Latin, to comment upon them, and to show the essential harmony of the two philosophers. Although he did not live to finish this project, he produced translations and commentaries on Aristotle's logical works and on Porphyry's Isagoge, as well as original treatises on arithmetic, music, and theology. His theological tractates, including works on the Trinity and against the Christological errors of Nestorius and Eutyches, display a precise use of Aristotelian logic in the service of Nicene orthodoxy. His treatises on arithmetic and music became standard textbooks in the medieval quadrivium.

In the early 520s political tensions between the Arian Ostrogothic court and the Catholic Roman aristocracy, and between Ravenna and Constantinople, grew acute. When the senator Albinus was accused of treasonous correspondence with the Eastern emperor Justin I, Boethius defended him, declaring that the charge was false and that if Albinus was guilty then he himself and the whole Senate were guilty as well. This defense, together with accusations that Boethius himself had conspired against Theodoric, led to his arrest. He was imprisoned at Ticinum (modern Pavia), stripped of his honors, and after a period of confinement was executed, traditionally in 524. During his imprisonment he composed De consolatione philosophiae, known in English as the Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue in prose and verse in which Philosophy personified consoles the narrator in his misfortune. The work, which draws on Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian themes and treats providence, fortune, and the highest good, became one of the most widely read and translated books of the Middle Ages.

Boethius was remembered in Pavia as a martyr, and a cult developed around his tomb in the church of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro. Dante Alighieri placed him among the wise in the Heaven of the Sun in the Paradiso. In 1883 Pope Leo XIII confirmed the ancient cult of Saint Severinus Boethius for the Diocese of Pavia; his feast is observed on 23 October. Through his translations and textbooks he transmitted a substantial portion of Greek logical and mathematical learning to the Latin Middle Ages, and the Consolation shaped medieval and early modern reflections on fortune, happiness, and divine providence.