Boethius on Finding One’s Purpose
Boethius was a highly successful politician who lived during the collapse of the Roman empire (476 A.D.). He was also a philosopher and a Christian, and was responsible for translating many of the classic Greek texts into Latin, and so had a wide-ranging impact on philosophy in the Medieval period. Remember how the Stoic philosopher Seneca was advisor to the Roman emperor Nero, then forced to commit suicide by him? Boethius’s life followed a strikingly similar trajectory: he was personal advisor to the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great, but fell out of favor with Theodoric and his court for exposing corruption in the court. He was eventually imprisoned, then sentenced to death.
The passage you will read for this session comes from Boethius’s work On the Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison while he awaited execution. The work is a dialogue between the imprisoned Boethius and a figure named Lady Philosophy, who uses arguments which she calls “medicines” to heal Boethius’s “sickness” of false beliefs about happiness and the purpose of life. In the selection you will read, Lady Philosophy discusses several possibilities for the purpose or final end of a human life. Some think life is about pleasure; others think it is about gaining honors; still others think our purpose is to become rich or powerful. Ultimately, Lady Philosophy argues that these are inadequate answers to the question of what life’s purpose is. Instead, she proposes that it is Supreme Goodness we are after, an idea not unlike Seneca’s “Highest Good”.
Since Boethius is a Christian, however, Supreme Goodness turns out to be identical with Supreme Divinity. God is maximally good, supremely good. Our pursuit of the Highest Good in life turns out to be a pursuit of God. And just as people become wise by gaining wisdom, or just by gaining justice, Lady Philosophy argues that if our purpose is to obtain the Highest Good, we can do so by becoming Good ourselves. Since Goodness and Divinity are identical, however, we can only become Good by becoming Divine, through participation in God’s nature.
Text: Excerpt from Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy
Learning Goals:
- Understand and assess Boethius’s claim that God is the Supreme Good, and that becoming divine is the ultimate purpose of human life.
- Be able to articulate Boethius’s reasons for rejecting honors, offices, power, fame, and pleasure, as viable goals for our life.
- Reflect about how Boethius’s reasoning concerning God and the Supreme Good might reshape your understanding of life’s purpose.
Questions to ponder as you read:
- Boethius tells us to pursue divinity, rather than things that are not up to us. Is his teaching a Stoic one?
- Is he right that wealth, fame, pleasure, honor, and power are all incapable of bringing us ultimate happiness?
- Is Boethius’s claim that our purpose is to become divine consistent with the Bible?
- Is Boethius a eudaimonist?
Further Reading:
- Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated with an introduction by Victor Watts. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1969.
- Marenbon, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Boethius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
The full text of Book 3 can be found here.