by CCW | 6 March 2018 21:00
This is the third of three Lenten meditations on “The Comfortable Words and the Literature of Consolation”. The first is posted here[1] and the second here[2].
Isaiah’s words of comfort and strength that mark the beginning of The Book of Consolation, chapters 40 through 55 of The Book of Isaiah, have their Christian counterpart not only in terms of Christ’s passion but also its application to us in our lives by way of St. Paul. Nowhere is that perhaps more clearly seen than in the wonderful words that belong to the beginning of his Second Letter to the Corinthians.
“Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulations, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God” (2nd Cor. 1. 3-4). It is a wonderful and, dare I say, comforting passage and one which belongs to the consideration of consolation. Meister Eckhart, one of the masters of the Consolation Literature, begins his treatise The Book of “Benedictus”: The Book of Divine Consolation with these words from 2nd Corinthians. In the words which immediately follow in the fifth verse of 2nd Corinthians 1, the connection between comfort and consolation is made explicit, yet again, and yet again, through the reality and the dynamic of suffering. “For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ.” Suffering is paradoxically and inescapably an essential feature of the consolation literature.
We meet tonight in the commemoration of St. Perpetua and Companions, early third century martyrs. “Another liveth in me,” Perpetua is reported to have said, and that sense of the indwelling of Christ in us speaks to the profoundest theme of the consolation literature, the idea of our intimate participation in the goodness of God even in the face of suffering and death, such as the martyrdom of Perpetua and her companions. It is really all about Christ in us and us in Christ. Therein lies the greatest good, the greatest comfort and consolation.
And yet, so many things stand in the way of our realizing this truth, a truth predicated precisely on how we look at things, upon our assumptions about the good and about happiness.
This brings us to one of the greatest works in the literature of consolation, Boethius’ 6th century classic The Consolation of Philosophy. He is not the first to use the word consolatio. It is the title of a lost treatise by Cicero upon the occasion of the death of his daughter, Tullio, about whose death he apparently was greatly bereaved. John Donne in the early 17th century draws upon a legend about that grief and about love undying or at least long-lasting in a poem celebrating married love. “Now as in Tullia’s tomb one lamp burnt clear, unchanged for fifteen hundred year/ May these love-lamps we enshrine with light, lasting equal the Divine.” Donne’s poem suggests that the fire of love is not meant to end in ashes; just so the pilgrimage of Lent which begins in ashes is not meant to end in ashes but in the renewing of our loves through our participation in the divine love. Christ crucified as Lancelot Andrewes notes is liber charitatis, the book of love opened for us to read.
With Boethius, the term consolatio becomes indelibly fixed and bound to philosophy. It is all of a piece with a tradition that has its ancient Greek and Roman precedents but also its early Christian and neo-Platonic expressions. One of the great moments in Augustine’s pageant of conversions in the Confessions is his conversion to philosophy in the form of another lost Ciceronian treatise, the Hortensius. It was his awakening to philosophy, to philosophy as the counter to our distresses and uncertainties. Suffering and sorrow, it seems, really depend upon how we look at things, about our expectations and desires, which have far more weight of meaning than the things which happen to us.
We are strengthened inwardly, in our souls, and this is a virtual commonplace of the literature of consolation. But Boethius has special standing in that tradition just because perhaps he belongs so wonderfully to the conjunction of things ancient and things Christian, to a kind of intellectual and spiritual convergence of philosophy and theology, though for him the terms and the separation they imply would have been puzzling, if not altogether incomprehensible.
His life’s ambition was to translate from Greek into Latin the works of Plato and Aristotle to a nascent and emerging Christian world, albeit one fraught with many tensions and contradictions. Writing in 524 AD or so, he was aware of the passing of the Roman empire but also that its legacy was perhaps beginning to be expressed in another form, the form of the Christian faith. The Consolation was written while in prison awaiting execution for trumped-up charges levelled against him by the Arian King, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. He lives what he writes and speaks, we might say, and all in a climate of political uncertainty and danger.
Divided into five parts, it is a remarkable treatise. It begins most powerfully with Boethius feeling very sorry for himself and utterly miserable only to be roundly admonished by one of the most remarkable of all philosophic images, Lady Philosophy. Her role in the Consolatio is reminiscent of that of Diotima in Plato’s Symposium. Like Socrates on Love, so Boethius on philosophy – the two subjects are really one – Diotima and Lady Philosophy teach us the way of the good, the way of true happiness. The whole work of the Consolatio is a dialogue between Boethius and Lady Philosophy complemented by exquisite forms of philosophic poetry which in themselves provide a kind of digest of ancient wisdom.
The work begins with the encounter in which Lady Philosophy appears to the grieving Boethius. The image is striking and draws upon the tradition of Wisdom literature in the Jewish Scriptures, particularly the image of Wisdom in The Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. Written in Greek, the word for wisdom is sophia, hence philosophia, the love of wisdom. “For in her there is a spirit that is intelligent, holy, … beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent and pure and most subtle.” Wisdom is understood to be created yet “wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty … she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.” Some of these attributes of wisdom influence the picture of Lady Philosophy in the Consolatio. The only explicit reference to a Scriptural text as distinct to the many references to Greek and Roman philosophy and literature in the Consolatio is a passage from The Wisdom of Solomon. “Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily: and sweetly doth she order all things,” a passage that also occurs in George Herbert’s poem Providence, a poem influenced by the Consolatio. Consolation is found in the love of philosophy, a love which counters and corrects our incomplete and false loves.
Lady Philosophy appears to Boethius as a woman whose “burning eyes penetrated more deeply than ordinary men” and who seemed both ancient and ever new, an echo of Augustine’s description of truth “tam antiquo, tam novo”, truth so ancient and ever new. At times “she seemed to confine herself to the ordinary measure of man, and at another the crown of her head touched the heavens; and when she lifted her head higher yet, she penetrated the heavens themselves, and was lost to the sight of men.” These images suggest the diversities and unity of knowledge, a knowledge of things below and things above. The work reflects on forms of natural philosophy, political philosophy, as well as ethical philosophy and metaphysics. The image here in the Consolatio contributes to the image of philosophers who have “walk’d with a staffe to heaven and traced fountains” in Herbert’s poem, The Agonie, an image of thinking about the ends and beginnings of all things; in short, metaphysics.
Yet, perhaps the most arresting form of the image of Lady Philosophy is about her dress, “made of very fine, imperishable thread, of delicate workmanship” and “shrouded by a kind of darkness of forgotten years, like a smoke-blackened family statue in the atrium.” The dress is embroidered on the lower border with the Greek letter ? (pi) and on the upper border with the Greek letter ? (theta), representing practical and theoretical pursuits. Between them are steps like a ladder mounting from the one to the other, from the practical to the theoretical, from the lower to the higher, but the dress is ripped, suggesting a separation between the practical and the theoretical. Lady Philosophy carries a book in her right hand and a sceptre in her left. It is a most compelling and intriguing image.
Steps like a ladder by which one ascends from the lower to the higher echo, it seems to me, Diotima’s ladder by which one ascends from beautiful bodies to beautiful minds to the form of the Good in the Symposium. One ascends by eros, by love, by the passionate desire to know. But there the ladder is not broken. While the ascent is conditional, as signaled in the repetition of a sequences of ‘ifs’ in Diotima’s speech, the ladder of ascent itself remains intact however challenging the ascent itself may be. The torn dress of Lady Philosophy in the Consolatio suggests another kind of difficulty that philosophy now encounters and one which perhaps remains with us.
As well as the Platonic ascent of the soul, the image also reflects the Augustinian adaptation of that ascent in terms of ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab inferioribus ad superiora, ‘from external things to internal things, from inferior to superior,’ which also belongs to the structure of the argument of the Consolatio. But these are almost intellectual commonplaces and merely serve to locate the Consolatio within a rich tradition of intellectual and philosophical reflection. The separation or the sharpening of the distinction between the practical and the theoretical is what is significant and seems to require a more concerted effort at consolation.
Lady Philosophy first of all banishes the Muses of Poetry who are the false comforters,not unlike the so-called comforters of Job, of Boethius in his distress for “they choke the rich harvest of the fruits of reason with the barren thorns of passion,” a fairly standard Platonic observation, but which has as well its biblical echoes, such as the parable of the sower and the seed. In their place, she suggests will be her Muses, the Muses of Philosophy. Boethius is allowed to express his distress of soul to her, itself a kind of therapy, a part of what one might call the talking cure in which there is the opportunity to objectify or externalise in words what troubles us. Boethius sees the shrink idea. Certainly in terms of the Comfortable Words and their place in the liturgy, there is the necessity of confession, though confession means a clear sense of one’s faults and failings and not simply a recounting of circumstances and events, not what has happened to you but what you have done. Nonetheless, the device here allows Boethius to explain his discontent which is more about how what has happened to him is itself a betrayal and a travesty of the truth itself.
One thing remains with him, as she notes, namely his awareness that the world is not moved at random or by chance but by God. That becomes the basis upon which the healing of his mind can proceed. His real problem, as Lady Philosophy notes, is that “you have forgotten what you are … you are wandering, forgetful of your real self” grieving “that you are an exile stripped of your goods.” In particular, he is ignorant of “the goal and end of all things” and about “the governance of the world” by “divine reason.” His healing begins with gentle medicines before moving on to stronger medicines. Paradoxically, those gentler medicines are “the sweet persuasiveness of rhetoric,” though it is rhetoric in the service of truth and philosophy.
Here he is reminded of the transitory and arbitrary nature of all that falls under fortuna which comes and goes indifferently and without care. In a way, the argument of the second book deals with outward and external things in their passing nature before turning inward. “Why then do you mortals look outside for happiness when it is really to be found within yourselves?”
The Third Book of the Consolatio proceeds to undertake to lead him ad veram felicitatem, to that true happiness. By many and different roads one and the same end is looked for, happiness. It is “the highest of all goods containing in itself all that is good, for if there were anything lacking to it, it could not be the highest good, since there would remain something outside it which could be desired,” the highest good which contains all goods. It is the kind of argument for happiness as the highest good that will be taken up by Anselm and Descartes as an argument for the existence of God. The desire for the true good is innate, Lady Philosophy says. The problem lies in our clinging to incomplete or partial goods without realizing how they participate in the absolute goodness of God. Good is sought for in wealth, honour, power, glory and pleasure but what is loved in each is really the good. The argument proceeds to reveal the incompleteness of these partial expressions of the good and the recognition that certain more abstract qualities are sought for in them, namely, self-sufficiency, power, and respect which are really three in one (a gentle hint at the Trinity?!).
This leads to the recognition of the human problem that contributes to our sorrows and griefs. What is one and simple in its nature, humans in our perversity split up into parts, dividing what is really one in itself, not realizing the unity of all goods in God. This leads to the critical passage about the divine governance of the world in a wonderful philosophical hymn. “O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas.” O thou who dost rule the world with everlasting reason. The challenge now is to show how everything that is good is good by participation in the good, an argument drawn from his treatise Quomodo Substantiae on that very topic.
The Consolatio continues to connect happiness with the greatest good and the good with the unity of all things. The Good and the One contrast with the dissolution of the self into error and multiplicity. Consolation is to be found in our being gathered into the goodness and the unity of God. The treatise proceeds in Book IV in examining the relation of good and evil, the distinction between fate and providence and finding, too, in Book V, that ratio, human discursive reasoning, depends upon and shares in the unitive knowing of intellectus.
“God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” The second of the Comfortable Words turns upon the idea of eternal life. Boethius provides the quintessential and classical definition of eternity: “the full, perfect and simultaneous possession of endless life.” The Consolatio recalls us to who we are in the sight of God and to a strengthening of our minds about the truth, the unity and the goodness of God in whom we find our true good and only comfort.
Fr. David Curry
Tuesday, March 6th, 2018
Comm. of Perpetua and Companions
The Comfortable Words & The Literature of Consolation III
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