Posted By BillHeise on June 19, 2009

This is an article associated with the article “15 Memorable Books.” See the article for an explanation of this article.
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Six months after I had my stroke, I was contacted by Joel Relihan asking me whether it was still okay to publish my article on the Menippean Boethius in the Middle Ages. I said it was okay. He sent it to me for editing. I returned it three weeks later with 14-18 minor grammatical corrections but without any major changes to the text.

I met Joel Relihan during my first semester at the University of Illinois. I was talking to someone about my ideas about the Roman de la Rose, and he mentioned Joel as having given a class in Menippean Satire on some of the medieval allegories that I was working on. So I got up right then and there and went over to the classics building and introduced myself to him.

We were both approaching the problem of medieval allegories from different perspective. We worked together on the problem, he on Boethius’ Consolation and I on the legacy of Boethius in Bernard Silvestris, Alan of Lille, the Roman de la Rose, and Edmund Spenser. But we were both creeping along in the dark. Both of us thought when I was in graduate school that Boethius was a pagan figure who was hostile to or even ignorant of Christianity. Neither of us had the entire solution to the problem, but both of us recognized that the solution offered by mainstream critics was problematical at best, and downright wrong at worst. We became good friends in the process.

After I finished graduate school, Joel asked me to write a chapter on the legacy of the Boethian Menippean Satire in the personification allegories of the Middle Ages. I told him that I had changed my mind about Boethius. I no longer believed that he was so adamantly anti-Christian. Joel told me that he, too, had had a change of heart. He sent me his book, and I went to work on my chapter, which you can find here, and went on my way.

Relihan told me in 1995 that his feelings about Boethius had changed. Mine had, too. But my feelings would change once again after I had written my chapter for his book after I read Cochrane in 1996. Cochrane pointed out to me the integrative function of the Christian approach to the mind. I realized that Boethius made sense as an expression of the Christian worldview.

For various reasons, it was not for another 10 years that Joel got around to publishing his work. He called me up out of the blue in 2005 and asked me if it was still okay for him to print my chapter. I said it was, of course, I had to confess that I just had a stroke and that my mind was not up to speed. In 2005, I was a mental cripple, and I could not wrap my head around such an abstract thought as I used to. So I did not revise my chapter to reflect my new understanding of Boethius. I sent the chapter back with  minor corrections. The book came out a year later.

But it bugged me that I wouldn’t ever have the opportunity of expressing myself fully on subjects that had once meant so much to me. In the summer of 2005, I was writing a book, but that book was going extremely slowly. It ended up taking three years to complete, but at the time I was convinced I would never get it done. I was writing for mental exercise.

Over time, however, my mental exercise paid off. I was able to express ideas like Augustine’s theory of time after two years. And so I thought that what I would do this I would go back and correct my dissertation based on my new theory of knowledge, which I had developed in 1996. I had abandoned my dissertation forever before I had my stroke. Afterwards, I thought it was a tragedy that the world would never know my idea about allegory (yeah, I know; what was I thinking?) So I broke up my dissertation three sections, which I was going to publish his three separate book; and I added a fourth prepatory book on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.

I spent 9 months writing my book on Boethius, and in it, I have divided reviews between “Boethius the author” and “Boethius the man who encounters pagan Philosophy.” Boethius the author is sure of his position, but the man who encounters Philosophy is still looking for answers. The dialogue between Boethius and Philosophy is recollected from the position of surety they can only have come from Boethius’s encounter with “a hidden treasure” that Boethius find in Philosophy’s words. She herself does not understand herself well enough to have found it on her own. The Boethius who encounters Philosophy in the dialog is so distraught that he cannot recollect what he used to know about the limitations of Philosophy. Only in the calm light of reflection on his experience does the author Boethius manage to put everything in order.

Philosophy represents herself as a guide to the other world, and in this she fails. But she is actually a fairly good representative of the dialectical position appropriate to the world of science. In my reading, Boethius is the last of the metaphysicians in the Platonic vein before the onset of the dark ages. She falls into the traps set by Derrida for the philosopher. Thinking she has answers to problems set by death and dying, she offers Boethius her solution, which is not to live, but to die in her service. The problem for Boethius is that he must literally die, as Socrates had died, in order to follow her. And, from a Christian perspective, suicide is a mortal sin. Therefore he asks her a lot of questions, and he never agrees to die for her.

However, Boethius is also the first scientist. Reflecting on her knowledge of hierarchies–hierarchies which she seeks to undo–he comes to understand that she is the lord of light, even as she points him to the darkness. In the end, Boethius decides he wants to live. This subverts Philosophy’s intent at the beginning of the work, where she substitutes herself for the theatrical Muses and asks him to die for her.

The modern world is built on Lorenzo Valla’s misunderstanding of Boethius. Valla had thought that Boethius had turned away from Christian metaphysics and towards pagan philosophy in his hour of need. Valla wanted to recover the Christian integrative vision that (he thought) had been lost by Boethius’s pagan turn. This involved finding the metaphysical perspective. That metaphysical perspective involved turning away from scholasticism’s bad science towards more integrated view of the world.

In the 1990s, the metaphysical view, which was built upon Descartes’ vision of God as the metaphysical anchor and Kant’s substitution of the individual mind for Descartes’ God, was rapidly failing. Derrida had come along with his skepticism that put the whole metaphysical program in jeopardy.

My interpretation of the modern predicament follows my reworking of Boethius. Boethius was building a metaphysical system in the Consolation. But that metaphysical system was failing. He had also built a system that separated science from metaphysics, and he had make Philosophy the keeper of science, not metaphysics. Metaphysics was failing in the modern day, but science had been ignored as opposed to metaphysics. Modern science, rather than a new metaphysic, prevails, and Boethius had given the first impulse for the division of science from metaphysics. In my reworking of the medieval tradition after Boethius, I emphasize the scientific character of allegory, rather than its metaphysical character.

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