Thomas Böhm/Thomas Jürgasch/Andreas Kirchner (Eds.)Boethius as a Paradigm of Late Ancient Thought

Boethius as a Paradigm of Late Ancient Thought

Proceedings of the 1st Symposium of the International Center for Boethian Studies

Herausgegeben von Thomas Böhm, Thomas Jürgasch und Andreas Kirchner

John MarenbonBoethius’s Unparadigmatic Originality and its Implications for Medieval PhilosophyThe title of this article needs an apology and an explanation. Not only is it unwieldy. It also presents itself as a discordant rejection of the line of thinking about Boethius on which this volume, and the conference which gave rise to it, are based. But ‘para-digm’ is, in my view, a strange word to use in connection with Boethius. Rather than acting as a paradigm, he is a writer who seems to resist being fitted into any of the apparently appropriate existing paradigms. This exceptionality emerges even when trying to answer some of the simplest questions about him. Was he a Church Father (like, for instance, Jerome or Gregory of Nyssa) or an ancient philosopher (like his near contemporary Ammonius)? The answer is obviously neither—and both. Does he belong to the Middle Ages—his birth coincided with the deposition of the last Western Roman Emperor—or to antiquity, with which his cultural ties were so much closer than those of Augustine, a century earlier? Again, it would be wrong to choose either alternative, and the same would be true even if it were asked, simply, whether he fits best into Greek or into Latin culture.

Taking Boethius as a paradigm is one side of what might be called the ‘conduit’ view of Boethius and his relation to the history of philosophy.1 On this view, there is a certain stock of ancient and late antique thought which is transmitted to the Middle Ages: Boethius is the conduit, the pipe, through which some of it flowed. One side of this view, then—the Boethius-as-paradigm side—is that Boethius contributed little himself, other than his knowledge of Greek and his ability, through his edu-cation, to reflect the interests, aims and ideas of his time. An extreme example of this approach is James Shiel’s thesis, now little credited, that Boethius’s logical com-mentaries are just translations of the marginalia in Greek manuscripts.2 The other

1 Cf. John Marenbon: Boethius, New York 2003, 4. This book, in the way it presents Boethius, mounts an extended, though largely concealed, argument against the ‘conduit’ view of Boethius. The discus-sion of Boethius’s own writings therefore draws on ideas I developed in that book, and my discussion of his influence uses arguments which I have developed in a number of other places: the many refer-ences to my own work in the footnotes which follow should not be taken as a symptom of egomania but rather as evidence of the purpose of this article: to draw out and make explicit a view which emerges implicitly from a range of my more specialized work. 2 James Shiel proposed his view in an article published in 1958 (“Boethius’s Commentaries on Ar-istotle”, in: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4, 217–244). The article, revised but putting forward the same thesis, appeared under the same title in Richard Sorabji (Ed.): Aristotle Transformed. The ancient commentators and their influence, London 1990, 349–272. The best response to it is given by Sten Ebbesen in his article, “Boethius as an Aristotelian Commentator” (373–391 at 375–377), re-printed, with minor changes, from “Boethius as an Aristotelian Scholar”, in: Jürgen Wiesner (Ed.): Ar-istoteles: Werk und Wirkung, Berlin/New York 1987, 286–311; and see also John Marenbon: Boethius,

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side of the conduit view is that medieval thinkers are envisaged as ‘receiving’ the ancient material, rather as we might drink the water which, despite the extensive pipe work, reaches us unadulterated from the source. Research into medieval philosophy becomes a bureaucratic activity of listing sources. A look at Courcelle’s in many ways magnificent study of the Consolation of Philosophy and the literary tradition should be enough to show that this description is not exaggerated.3

The following paragraphs attack the conduit view of Boethius from both sides. On the one side, Boethius was not, they will argue, a paradigm. Of course, he belonged to a tradition and he reflected his age, but his plan of work and what he wrote was determined by his own particular interests and views. On the other side, they will try to show, by a few examples, that the way his works were used in the Middle Ages was anything but the passive reception of material passed on from ancient sources.

The title uses the word ‘originality’, because to some extent, it is helpful in convey-ing the point this paper wishes to make. Neither Boethius, nor his medieval readers, were mere ciphers: they were original thinkers. But in its normal use ‘original’ has too narrow a sense for its purpose here. We think of originality in philosophy usually in terms of new theses or arguments which a thinker has devised himself. Boethius was certainly capable of originality in this narrower sense: witness, for example, his argu-ment about divine prescience in Book V of the Consolation. But both Boethius’s own intellectual character and the norms of the time meant that he more often showed originality in a wider sense – in choosing among alternative existing views, in adapt-ing and combining them in new ways, and in making them serve new ends. The main subject of the following pages is how Boethius showed this broad-sense originality in his logical commentaries, in a way which had a profound effect on medieval thought. But to present this idea and stop there would, in one important way, create a mislead-ing impression. In his logical commentaries, Boethius took a line of approach which directly affected the line of approach followed in the Middle Ages: Boethian original-ity (in the broad sense) leads directly to a certain result later on. But influence often follows a less straightforward pattern of cause and effect, and this paper will end by looking quickly at two areas where Boethius was indeed original, but his original-ity led to a result which could never have been predicted from the moves which he himself made.

Although it is unlikely that he ever attended one, Boethius’s education and contacts brought him into close contact with the Platonic schools of Athens and Alexandria and their programme of studies. When, in the prima editio of his commentary on On

20; Sten Ebbesen: “The Aristotelian Commentator”, in: John Marenbon (Ed.): The Cambridge Compan-ion to Boethius, Cambridge 2009, 34–55 at 47–49.3 Pierre Courcelle: La Consolation de Philosophie dans la tradition littéraire. Antécédents et postérité de Noèce, Paris 1967.

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Interpretation, Boethius announces his intention to translate into Latin all the works of Aristotle he can find, and all of Plato’s dialogues, and to write commentaries on them,4 he is saying that, in effect, he intends to make a Latin version of the curricu-lum of these schools. The other work he announces—in which he will show that Plato and Aristotle agree on most points of philosophy—is also in accord with the thinking of these schools, and their overall plan of study, in which students, beginning with logic, went on to read Aristotle’s other works and then to study Plato.5 This announce-ment of Boethius’s seems, then, to be a piece of strong evidence for the Boethius-as-paradigm position that is being attacked here. Of course, as everyone knows, Boethius did not complete his ambitious project. Indeed, he did not even get a quarter of the way through it. What has survived are commentaries just on most of Aristotle’s logical works and a set of logical treatises, and there is no evidence that any non-logical commentaries have been lost, except perhaps for some notes or text relating to the Physics. Boethius, of course, could not know, when he declared his intentions some time before 516, that a few years later Theoderic would invite him to become his chief minister, and that, whether because of his uprightness or his political ineptitude, he would quickly be labelled a traitor, imprisoned and executed. His plans were, all too literally, cut short. But his premature death does not completely explain his failure to see through his plan. Had Boethius really been doing as he announced, and working systematically through his programme of translation and commentary? Suppose Boethius had never been called by Theoderic and had continued his scholarly life in Rome. If he had continued through the curriculum in the way that he had started with the logic, he would have spent his later fifties and sixties and some of his seventies translating and commenting on Aristotle’s non-logical works, leaving Plato for the rest of his seventies and beyond. Only if he had continued to work with full capac-ity until he was 90 or so, he might have fulfilled his plans. Boethius’s progress was so slow, because he let himself become fascinated, beyond the requirements of his overall project, with one aspect of it: logic.

It was understandable that Boethius should start with logic, which came at the start of the curriculum, but he was so taken by this field that he expanded his treat-ment of it, in such a way as to make the goal of commenting all, or even any, of Plato an unlikely one, whatever happened. Even before he had announced his plan, he had gone to the trouble of replacing his early dialogue-form commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, which used the existing translation by Marius Victorinus, with a new com-mentary and his own translation. When it came to On Interpretation, he had decided from the start to provide two commentaries, one of which would concentrate on close,

4 Boethius: Commentarii in librum Aristotelis Peri hermēneias, ed. C. Meiser, II, (= Bibliotheca Teub-neriana), Leipzig 1880, 79:9–80:9.5 See, for instance, Sten Ebbesen: “Boethius as an Aristotelian Commentator”; “The Aristotelian Commentator”.

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literal exegesis, the other range more widely and probe more deeply. He also chose to extend his treatment of logic by writing text-books, as well as commentaries, covering not just categorical syllogisms (as dealt with in On Interpretation and the Prior Ana-lytics) but also a branch of logic hardly treated by Aristotle, hypothetical syllogisms. Moreover, in the period directly before his removal to Ravenna and then imprison-ment, he became deeply involved with the theory of topical arguments. Besides com-menting on Aristotle’s Topics—a work now lost—which is all that his project would have required, he wrote a long and digressive commentary on Cicero’s Topics and a substantial textbook on the area, De topicis differentiis.6

Boethius did not merely show a strong leaning towards logic, in the rather broad sense indicated by the Aristotelian logical curriculum. He also showed a very particu-lar type of interest, a preference for one sort of approach above others, in the way in which he wrote his logical works. So far as the commentaries are concerned, at least, this is not mostly a matter of his own argumentative invention, of originality in the narrow sense. The late ancient commentary tradition took borrowing, what we would call blatant plagiarism, for granted. Boethius’s originality is of the wider sort, and it lies especially in his choice of sources, or rather, of his main source—Porphyry. Por-phyry’s De interpretatione commentary is lost, but Boethius’s own declaration that he has taken his exposition mostly from Porphyry’s, which he judged the most penetrat-ing and best ordered,7 and parallels with Ammonius, who is apparently using the same material, make it very likely that it is the main source for the two On Interpre-tation commentaries. There are, indeed, in both of these commentaries on Aristotle traces of post-Porphyrian material. This shows that Boethius had access to the more recent tradition of commentary but that he chose in the main to ignore it, in favour of

Boethius was not, of course, in the happy position of modern scholars who can have an extensive array of Greek commentaries on their bookshelves or at a browser’s flick. Boethius’ choice was, no doubt, highly constrained by what happened to be available, but, if he largely followed Porphyry, it is reasonable to assume that it was because he was generally happy with what Porphyry offered; he was aware of other sources and other approaches, but chose not in the main to follow them. This predi-lection for Porphyry is significant because there was a distinction between Porphyry’s approach to commenting on Aristotelian logic and that which had become common in the Greek tradition by Boethius’ time. Both approaches were developed within Neoplatonic schools and accepted that there was an underlying harmony between Plato and Aristotle. But, for Porphyry, that harmony was to be found by accepting that Aristotelian logic is concerned with the sensible world that is the subject of human

6 See John Marenbon: Boethius, 16–65, for a more detailed presentation of how Boethius’s logical interests led him to devote his energies to this field, leaving the rest of his grand project of translation and harmonization pending.7 Boethius: Commentarii in librum Aristotelis Peri hermēneias, II, 7:5–9.

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language: Its conclusions do not conflict with Platonic metaphysics because they are about a different subject-matter. The later Greek commentators did not entirely reject Porphyry’s approach (and they continued to use much from his commentar-ies), but they were keen to try to interpret parts of Aristotle’s logical texts in a much more directly Platonic way, and to introduce more Platonic material into their digres-sions.8 This is, no doubt, a crude characterization of the difference, and recent work has brought out the extent to which, even when he is ostensibly keeping to the foot-steps of Aristotle, as in the famous Eisagoge, Porphyry still shows Platonic habits of thoughts.9 None the less, broadly speaking the contrast remains valid.

Boethius consistently follows the Porphyrian—that is to say, the more Aristote-lian—approach. For example, in Boethius’s commentary on On Interpretation, by con-trast with Ammonius’s, there is no trace of a Cratylean approach to language; words are considered to be strictly conventional.10 And, rather than resort to the Iamblichan speculations on God’s way of knowing to deal with the problem of God, as Ammonius did and Boethius himself would do, at a certain point in his discussion in the Conso-lation, he treats the problem as one that can be solved by logico-linguistic analysis.11

In both these cases, it is most likely that Boethius is following Porphyry’s lost commentary, rather than working out the line of argument for himself; at all events, he is taking the Porphyrian approach and not the approach more popular in his time. When he commented on Porphyry’s own Isagoge, Boethius could not, of course, turn to a commentary by Porphyry. Yet, if the Porphyrian approach is marked by its respect for Aristotle’s own way of thought, then—in connection with the most famous passage in the whole Isagoge—Boethius shows himself, by contrast with the Greek tradition (as represented by Ammonius and later commentators) to be even more Porphyr-ian than Porphyry himself. Porphyry refuses to answer, in a book for beginners, the three questions about genera and species that he poses. His commentators were not

8 See Sten Ebbesen: Commentators and Commentaries on Aristotle’s Sophistici Elenchi, (= Corpus Latinum Commentariorum in Aristotelem Graecorum; 7), Leiden 1981, and Christos Evangeliou: Aris-totle’s Categories and Porphyry, (= Philosophia antiqua; 48), Leiden 1988.9 Riccardo Chiaradonna: “Porphyry and Iamblichus on Universals and Synonymous Predication”, in: Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 18 (2007), 123–140.10 See John Marenbon: Boethius, 33.11 Extensive discussion, along with an English translation of the relevant section of the commentary, will be found in Ammonius: On Aristotle On Interpretation 9: With Boethius On Aristotle On Inter-pretation 9, first and second commentaries, transl. by David Blank and Norman Kretzmann, London 1998 (for an evaluation of the interpretation here, see John Marenbon: Boethius, 37–41). Although in the Consolation Boethius certainly does introduce ideas about God’s knowledge which are related to Iamblichus’s thinking, it is possible to see his central argument there as far more closely related to the position in the Commentary than is usually thought: see John Marenbon: “Divine Prescience and Contingency in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy”, in: Discussioni sulla contingenza da Boezio a Leibniz, ed. by Mariateresa Fumagalli, Beonio Brocchieri and Riccardo Fedriga (= Rivista di storia della filosofia; 68), Milan 2013, 9–21, at 13–14.

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so forbearing. Alain de Libera has shown that, by Boethius’s time, there was a well-established line of response, based on the idea that there are three sorts of genera and species—forms ‘before the many’, ‘in the many’ and ‘after the many’.12 In neither of his Isagoge commentaries, as De Libera notes, does Boethius make obvious use of this idea.13 The second commentary has, rather, a solution based on abstraction, taken, as Boethius says explicitly, from Alexander of Aphrodisias, the leading Aristo-telian to whom Porphyry himself owed so much. It is important not to exaggerate the contrast here between Boethius’s approach and a more Platonic one. Richard Cross has recently argued that Boethius does follow, though not openly, the division into three sorts of genera and species.14 I myself have suggested that, whilst his solution follows the lines of Alexander’s and Porphyry’s abstractionism, it gives it a realistic, and ultimately Platonic, twist.15 For all that, in this passage he is certainly far from any explicit Platonism.

There is no space here to look at the logical monographs, but it is worth noting in passing that their source material was predominantly Porphyrian and Aristotelian. On Division is based, it seems, on (now lost) writing by Porphyry himself, prolegom-ena to a commentary on the Sophist which, though prefacing a work by Plato were Aristotelian in background and approach. Boethius himself mentions Porphyry as a source for his textbooks on categorical syllogism, along with the very early Aristote-lians Eudemus and Theophrastus. For his works on topical argument, the position is slightly different because of the importance of his fellow Roman, Cicero. But Boethi-us’s other main source here is Themistius. Themistius lived in the fourth century, when Neoplatonism was dominant, but he resisted the trend and followed Aristotle. Moreover, had the commentary on Aristotle’s Topics survived, the Aristotelian bias of this area of Boethius’s work would have been even more evident.16

There is, however, one strong counter-argument that might be made against my claim that Boethius, like Porphyry, eschews the non-Aristotelian interpretations of Aristotle which attracted many of his contemporaries. Ammonius and Simplicius, probably basing themselves on Iamblichus, introduce Neopythagorean elements into

12 Alain de Libera: La querelle des universaux. De Platon à la fin du Moyen Âge, Paris 1996, 103–105.13 Alain de Libera: L’art des généralités, Théories de l’abstraction, Paris 1999, 159–280, esp. 199–202.14 Richard Cross: “Form and Universal in Boethius”, in: British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (2012), 439–458.15 John Marenbon: “Boèce, Porphyre et les varieties de l’abstractionnisme”, in: Laval théologique et philosophique 68 (2012), 9–20. This is a rather more nuanced and detailed discussion than that in my Boethius, 26–32.16 See John Marenbon: Boethius, 46, 56–57 for brief discussion of sources of some of these mono-graphs, and John Magee (Ed.): Anicii Manlii Severini Boethii ‘De divisione liber’, (= Philosophia an-tiqua; 77), Leiden/Boston/Cologne 1998, xxxiv–lvii, for a thorough discussion of the sources of De divisione.

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their interpretation of the Categories. A special reason for doing so was the existence of a Neopthagorean treatise on the Categories that claimed, falsely, to have been written by Archytas. Since Archytas predated him, Aristotle was, therefore, to be regarded merely as the arranger, not the inventor, of the doctrine of the categories. Boethius’s single commentary on the Categories, closely based on Porphyry, is entirely free from Neopythagoreanism. But it has been claimed that Boethius wrote a second, advanced commentary on the Categories, now mainly or entirely lost; and that this was Neopy-thagorean in the manner of contemporary and later Platonists. Three arguments have been made for the existence of this work: 1. Monika Asztalos has suggested that a description of the scope of the Categories

in the second On Interpretation commentary might refer to a second Catego-ries commentary, because it does not accord with the surviving commentary’s description of its scope.17 But in the passage Asztalos mentions, Boethius is not talking about a commentary he has written, but about Aristotle’s intention. It is not surprising that his description of it here, when he is concerned to make the contrast with On Interpretation, should be different from what he says in the Cat-egories commentary. Nothing follows about the existence of a second Categories commentary.

2. Pierre Hadot considers that a fragment of commentary found in a ninth century manuscript is from this commentary. But there is no manuscript attribution and it goes against Boethius’s authorship that the translator appears (a textual problem makes certainty difficult) to have rendered logos in the lemma under discussion as definitio, whereas Boethius in this commentary (and most fre-quently elsewhere) translates it as ratio. In any case, even if the fragment is from a second commentary by Boethius to the Categories, there is no need to suppose that the commentary went on to be Neopythagorean. The piece of commentary on the very beginning of the text, all that survives, is related to Porphyry’s work, rather than Iamblichus’s.18

17 See Boethius: Commentarii in librum Aristotelis Peri hermēneias, II, 7:18–27 (“atque hoc distat libri huius intentio a praedicamentorum in denariam multitudinem numerositate collecta, ut hic qui-dem tantum de numero significantium vocum quaeratur, quantum ad ipsas attinet voces, quibus sig-nificativis vocibus intellectus animi designentur, quae sunt scilicet simplicia quidem nomina et verba, ex his vero conpositae orationes: praedicamentorum vero haec intentio est: de significativis rerum vocibus in tantum, quantum eas medius animi significet intellectus.”); cf. Monika Asztalos: “Boethius as a Transmitter of Greek Logic to the Latin West: The Categories”, in: Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 95 (1993), 367–407, at 380–381, where she says that the description cannot refer to the existing Categories commentary, since “there the scope of the Categories was described without any mention of concepts.” (380).18 See Pierre Hadot: “Un fragment du commentaire perdu de Boèce sur les Catégories d’Aristote dans le Codex Bernensis 363”, in: Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 26 (1959), 11–27.

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3. A passage that appears near the beginning of the Categories commentary, but was probably, as Monika Asztalos has shown, written when Boethius was some way through the commentary (and has probably been inserted at not quite the right place),19 does seem at first sight to provide a better argument. Boethius makes it clear that the commentary he is now writing is for beginners, but that he intends to compose another commentary on the categories ‘for the more learned’, where he will teach ‘Pythagorean learning’ and discuss the intention, order and utility of the text, setting out and adjudicating the different views about its intention. The mention of ‘Pythagorean learning’ suggests the Iambli-chan approach, linked to the idea of Archytas as inventor of the doctrine of the categories. Yet a few paragraphs later (Boethius mentions the work by Archytas and remarks that, whilst it led Iamblichus to conclude that Aristotle had not invented the Categories, Themistius did not accept that the treatise was written by the ancient Pythagorean Archytas.20 It seems then that Boethius would not have accepted the Iamblichan approach uncritically, supposing he ever did write a second commentary.

Altogether, there is some reason to think that Boethius remained sufficiently suspi-cious of the ‘Pythagorean learning’ needed to interpret the Categories for the more learned to have postponed the undertaking indefinitely, or began it but did not con-tinue far with it.21

The conclusion emerges, then, that although Boethius did not actually plan to bequeath to his medieval successors just the Aristotelian logical part of the Neopla-tonic school curriculum, the fact that he did so reflected his own special interests, and that, furthermore, in the commentaries, usually by following Porphyry, he took a far more sober, Aristotelian approach than would have been usual at the time. The influence of this broad-sense originality of Boethius’s on medieval philosophy was immense; and for eleventh and twelfth-century thought, indeed, it was decisive for its whole tenor. The study of logic—Aristotelian logic as conceived by Boethius—was at the centre of philosophy from the late tenth century onwards, when the full Boe-

19 Boethius: In Categorias Aristotelis libri quatuor, ed. J.-P. Migne, (= PL; 64), 160A–B; cf. Monika Asztalos: “Boethius as a Transmitter of Greek Logic to the Latin West: The Categories”, 384–388, who also gives the text of the relevant passage from the MSS. 20 Boethius In Categorias Aristotelis libri quatuor, 160A–B.21 I discuss this question in Boethius, 23, but my discussion in this article is somewhat more de-tailed, although the main arguments are the same. In a note there (187, n. 23) I promise to discuss the subject more fully in a forthcoming article which never appeared. I do not, in fact, think that there is much more to discuss about this question, in the present state of the evidence. Boethius certainly may have written the longer commentary, and it is possible that the fragment discovered by Hadot comes from it, but these are conjectures, and it would be unwarranted to allow them to disturb the pic-ture of Boethius’s predilections and aims that emerges clearly from the works of his that do survive.

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thian curriculum began to be studied.22 The Categories provided a basic metaphys-ics to be investigated, questioned or developed; On Interpretation a semantics and philosophy of mind, as well as a stimulus to think about the metaphysical problems posed by topics such as facts and states of affairs, and modality. In all these cases, the initial direction of discussion was that set by Boethius, even though it was usually left behind as brilliant thinkers took it to a more and more sophisticated level.23

The Problem of Universals illustrates the point very well. Boethius’s solution based on Alexander of Aphrodisias provided both a starting point and also, in the main, a marker for the most realistically inclined solution; Platonic realism was more or less ruled out as a fitting response, and thinkers began to experiment with types of ontology far more parsimonious than any of the ancient examples.24 The best way to gauge the overall Boethian effect is perhaps by a negative example: that of John Scottus Eriugena, the ninth-century thinker who knew the Isagoge and a paraphrase of the Categories, but not, apparently, Boethius’s commentaries; and who had come into contact with late Neoplatonism through the Greek Christian writers, and perhaps even indirectly with the post-Porphyrian tradition of commentary on Aristotle’s logic through Maximus the Confessor. In Eriugena’s masterpiece, the Periphyseon, can be seen the shape a thoroughly Neoplatonized logic might take in Latin dress, and its dire consequences, even in the hands of a genius, for comprehensible and coherent philosophizing.25 Eriugena’s approach was fleetingly influential but it never became the mainstream. Rather, logic and metaphysics in the Latin West, up until the end of the twelfth century, was founded on Boethius’s approach to Aristotle’s logic. True,

22 I suggest in “The Latin Tradition of Logic to 1100”, in: Dov M. Gabbay/John Woods (Eds.): A Hand-book of the History of Logic, 2 Medieval and Renaissance Logic, Amsterdam 2008, 1–63, esp. 38–42, that the tradition of logic, which grows up at the end of the tenth century and goes on until the end of the twelfth century should be seen as specifically Boethian. See also, for further elaboration of this idea, my article “La logique en occident latin (ca. 780–ca. 1150): le programme des études et ses enjeux”, in: Julie Brumberg-Chaumont (Ed.): Ad notitiam ignoti. L’ ‘Organon’ dans la ‘translatio studiorum’ à l’époque d’Albert le Grand, Turnhout 2013, 173–191. 23 Cf. Margaret Cameron: “Boethius on Utterances, Understanding and reality”, in: John Marenbon (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Boethius, 85–104, at 96–98.24 For a general survey of positions on universals in the early Middle Ages, see Alain de Libera: La querelle des universaux. De Platon à la fin du Moyen Âge, 125–175.25 See John Marenbon: “John Scottus and the Categoriae Decem”, in: Werner Beierwaltes (Ed.): Eriu-gena: Studien zu seinen Quellen, Heidelberg 1980, 116–134. I return to these themes and qualify some of the more extreme opinions in this article in “Eriugena, Aristotelian Logic and the Creation” forthcoming in the proceedings of the Chicago 2012 Eriugena conference, ed. by Willemien Otten. In his very important recent study, L’homme commun. La genèse du réalisme ontologique durant le haut Moyen Âge, Paris 2012, Christophe Erismann has shown how, on the theme of universals, Eriugena may well have been one of a line of thinkers, stretching back to Porphyry and forward to William of Champeaux in the early twelfth century. Even so, his particular, highly Platonized development of logic remained without followers, except among what seem to have been his earliest and closest fol-lowers.

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a supremely talented thinker such as Abelard would tinge the apparently respectful comments he made about Boethius with a touch of condescension. But he was able to surpass him as a logician, and to propose a challengingly different metaphysics from that which he, or any ancient writer, had envisaged, only because of the riches he had derived from Boethius’s doggedly unfashionable adherence to the logical tradition of Porphyry and Aristotle.

As noted near the beginning of the article, there were some areas where Boethius’s originality has important results in the Middle Ages, but—by contrast with the areas just discussed—the nature of these results was completely unpredictable. Two such areas are the logic of consequence, and the difficult questions surrounding the rela-tionship between pagan culture and philosophy and Christianity.

In the brief comments above on the sources Boethius’s monographs, nothing was said about one of them, his treatise on hypothetical syllogisms. Boethius probably did have some Greek source material, but there is every reason to think that much in the treatise was of his own devising, if only for the back-handed reason that no more competent logician would have persevered so unflinchingly in such a misguided enterprise. In antiquity the Stoics had developed a propositional logic, though not a term logic. They understood, though in a somewhat rudimentary way, how opera-tors such as ‘not’, ‘or’ and ‘if … then …’ connect whole propositions. Aristotle, by contrast, developed a term logic, but seems to have had little notion of propositional logic. Once the Aristotelian tradition of logic became dominant and Stoicism faded, well before Boethius’s time, logicians forgot the Stoic notion of the logic propositions. There is nothing strange, then, about the fact in De hypotheticis syllogismis there is no grasp of propositional operations—of, for instance, negating the whole of a proposi-tion such as ‘If it’s day, it’s light’ so as to say ‘The following is not the case: If it’s day, it’s light’; nothing strange about Boethius’s thinking of an example like this in the subject-predicate language of term logic and being able to envisage negation only as negating the predication in the consequent or in the antecedent. What is extraor-dinary is that, despite this lack of understanding, Boethius persisted in tabulating a whole scheme of syllogisms involving, not just straightforward ‘if … then…’ proposi-tions, but iterated ones, such as ‘If, if A, then B, then C’, or ‘If, if A then B, then if C then D’. By introducing various constraints, Boethius managed to obtain, with enormous effort and one by one, the results which he would have reached much more swiftly had he grasped the principles of propositionality. It is as if someone had forgotten the technique for long multiplication and so set about painstakingly working out a set of tables up to 100 x 100.26 But this tedious monograph was studied from the late tenth

26 On Boethius’s theory of the hypothetical syllogism, see John Marenbon: Boethius, 50–56 and Christopher J. Martin: “The Logical Textbooks and their Influence”, in: John Marenbon (Ed.): The Cam-bridge Companion to Boethius, 56–84.

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century onwards, and in the twelfth century Abelard, like someone who sees beneath the clumsy over-painting the lines of masterpiece, was able somehow to recover the propositional logic which underlies Boethius’s scheme but which Boethius himself did not comprehend.

This reconstruction of the story of propositional logic from Boethius to Abelard is due to Christopher Martin.27 Martin understandably sees it as showing the glory of Abelard the logician, to the detriment of Boethius. But it teaches a deeper lesson – about the unpredictability of influence. Boethius’s quirky insistence on blocking out a field of logic he could not properly compass leads his readers to gain the mastery of it that eluded him.

A similar lesson can be learned from a very different text, Boethius’s most famous and influential work, the Consolation of Philosophy, and its treatment of the relation-ship between Christian truth and the wisdom, if it is wisdom, of pagan philosophy—one aspect of what I describe as ‘the Problem of Paganism’.28 Most interpreters of the Consolation choose one of three lines of interpretation according to which this relationship, as found in the text of the prosimetrum, is an uncomplicated one. Some suggest that, in the Consolation, Boethius turned to pagan philosophy, and neglected, if not abandoned, his Christian belief.29 A diametrically opposite view has been urged recently, especially by Joel Relihan. According to it, the audience was supposed to supply a Christian perspective in reading the Consolation, according to which Phi-losophia is not a truly authoritative figure but rather one who cannot but disappoint the prisoner. Writing a Consolation of Philosophy was, then, Boethius’s ironic way of affirming his Christianity and putting the philosophical tradition in its place.30 The most common view avoids either extreme. According to it, there is no conflict between Christianity and pagan philosophy: Boethius decided to put the philosophical case and so wrote a Consolation of Philosophy, but all the time he remained the same com-mitted Christian who had written the Opuscula sacra.31

27 See Christopher J. Martin: “Denying Conditionals: Abaelard and the failure of Boethius’ account of the hypothetical syllogism”, in: Vivarium 45 (2007), 153–168.28 I discuss Boethius in connection with ‘the Problem of Paganism’ in “Boethius and the Problem of Paganism”, in: American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 78 (2004), 329–348, although many as-pects of my thinking about the area have evolved since then—in particular, I no longer think that this problem only arose after the time of Boethius. My book on the Problem of Paganism in the Long Mid-dle Ages (Pagans and Philosophers) is almost finished and should appear, published by Princeton University Press, in 2014.29 This is Courcelle’s view (La Consolation dans la tradition littéraire) and also that suggested by Alain Galonnier in: Boèce. Opuscula sacra. I. Capita dogmatica (Traités II, III, IV). Introduction, traduc-tion et commentaire (= Philosophes Médiévaux; 47), Louvain-la-Neuve/Louvain/Paris 2007.30 See Joel Relihan: The Prisoner’s Philosophy. Life and death in Boethius’s Consolation, Notre Dame 2007.31 This view is put forward by, among many, Henry Chadwick: Boethius: the Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology and Philosophy, Oxford 1981.

148   John Marenbon

Perhaps, however, none of these views is quite right, though none is completely wrong. Maybe in the Consolation Boethius is trying to put a more complex, subtle view about the relationship between Christianity and pagan philosophy. The work is written for Christian readers who are not supposed to lose sight of the fact that the authoritative figure is a pagan and the man she consoles a Christian. Her efforts to provide a rational consolation do not fail, but neither do they entirely succeed. There is a level of knowledge to which she cannot rise, but she herself is aware of this limita-tion, and aware of it not in spite of, but because of her philosophical understanding.

In the Middle Ages, the Consolation would have an important influence on think-ing about pagan wisdom. But the nature of the influence was largely detached from Boethius’s own reflections on the subject, and the way they moulded the work. Far more important was the fact that, in a text by an author who was known as a Chris-tian, there occurred direct presentations of pagan philosophical ideas, above all, the epitome of the Timaeus presented in Book III, metrum 9. It was only natural to assume that this epitome, being the work of a Christian author, could be interpreted, if not in an explicitly Christian sense, then at least in one not contradictory to the tenets of Christianity. But, in that case, the Timaeus itself—and Platonic doctrine as found in other sources, such as Macrobius’s commentary on the Somnium Scipionis—must also be interpretable in this way. The historical serendipity by which Book III, metrum 9 became well known before the Timaeus and other pagan sources for Platonism were widely and closely studied meant that two sorts of interpretation were opened up for the Platonic material: neutralizing interpretation, in which unacceptable doc-trines were explained away and the Platonic texts rescued as a source for scientific ideas; and the less common Christianizing interpretation, which discovered specifi-cally Christian doctrines, such as the Trinity (or even the Incarnation) in these pagan texts. William of Conches was the great champion of neutralizing interpretation in the twelfth century, and Peter Abelard the leader of the Christianizers.32

These two brief accounts of the influence of a logical monograph and of the Con-solation do not just provide extra ammunition to attack the conduit view of Boethi-us’s influence. They also help to guard against an even graver error than the conduit theory—one which the first and longer part of this paper might encourage: the error of thinking that influence follows orderly patterns. Not only should Boethius’s original-ity and that of his medieval readers be recognized. We need to understand that that influence sometimes follows unpredictable paths, and that the past as it shapes some future present is rarely any more than a distant relation of that past as it actually hap-pened. It is not only Boethius’s originality, but also the way it influenced succeeding centuries, which is unparadigmatic.

32 See John Marenbon: “Abelard’s Intellectual Contexts”, in: Jeff Brower/Kevin Guilfoy (Eds.): The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, Cambridge 2004, 13–44, at 35–38. This subject is treated at great-er length in my Pagans and Philosophers.