The Trivium and the Good Life in Boethius’s Comfort of Philosophy
Anthony G. Cirilla
Editor’s Be aware: This essay comes out of a chat that Dr. Cirilla gave on the 2024 The Classical Thistle Convention. We now have included directives in direction of slides within the linked PowerPoint as a manner of mixing written essay with the visible aids of the slide deck used within the presentation.
Why research the liberal arts? Why research them in a tradition which more and more devalues their significance? What good can the liberal arts serve us in a world that calls for outcomes when their research is so gradual and painstaking? As Chaucer as soon as wrote of poetry, “So quick the life, so lengthy the craft to study.” What does a classical schooling have to supply when devotion could not solely make you appear quaint and a bit behind the occasions however even an impediment to progress? And when the sunshine of night fades and we put together to give up our last breath, what worth will finding out the liberal arts have yielded? Though questions related to us at present, these questions had been additionally straight and personally related to the topic of this essay, Boethius.
Fifteen hundred years in the past, in 524, Boethius discovered himself thrown into imprisonment by the Ostrogothic King and Senate he had faithfully served. His conspicuous political success had been constructed on his achievements within the liberal arts, each the Trivium and the Quadrivium, particularly within the arts of logic, rhetoric, geometry, and music, the fountainhead of knowledge he had additionally pulled on in his political selections. He had undertaken his political duties with religion that finding out the liberal arts would make him a greater public servant, and make Rome a extra unified place. And when King Theodoric, who had appointed him as Grasp of Places of work in a job straight tied to this function of promoter of liberal arts schooling, noticed Boethius get up for his buddy on the premise of the virtues these arts had instilled in him, Theodoric let him take the autumn. No trial, no justice. Imprisonment and the dying penalty for doing the appropriate factor, doing it the best way he did and believing it the best way he did due to his coaching in those self same liberal arts that, one might say, received him killed. So it was no theoretical query: Was all of that finding out actually price it?
[Slide 2] It’s essential to recollect, once you hear the title Comfort of Philosophy, that this e book was written by somebody on dying row primarily for finding out the idea within the title. Boethius took very significantly the etymology of Philosophy, the Love of Knowledge, from his youth up, and that is the emotional weight behind his recognition that she has appeared to him: “I turned my eyes and stuck my gaze upon her, and I noticed it was my nurse in whose home I had been cared for since my youth – Philosophy.” Philosophy is the end result of the research of the liberal arts, and so when the personification of Girl Philosophy seems to Boethius, she just isn’t solely consoling him about the issue of evil understood theologically—Why did God let this occur?—although that was in fact the query. However the issue of evil had turn into intensely pedagogical—did the liberal arts actually assist Boethius to stay a very good life? Philosophy’s reply is in fact sure: “That is hardly the primary time Knowledge has been threatened with hazard by the forces of evil… when their forces assault us in superior numbers, our basic [Wisdom] conducts a tactical withdrawal… to a stronghold [arce]…” (1.p3) Philosophy speaks as these arts within the flesh so to talk, there to reply that very query on her personal behalf. So once we focus on the function of the Trivium within the good life for Boethius, it’s of the utmost significance that we contemplate why he selected to place the higher a part of his Comfort within the phrases of this dazzling personification and her protection of the liberal arts philosophy.
[Slide 3] So let’s begin there, speaking about what Boethius would imply by a liberal arts philosophy. We talked about that the phrase philosophy means the love of knowledge, and the truth that he determined to personify philosophy means he takes the phrase “love” very significantly—loving knowledge not solely as an idea however as if it had been an individual, as if we might have a relationship with philosophy the best way we might have a relationship with a buddy. Friendship is likewise essential to Boethius, as true friendship just isn’t merely a results of circumstance or mutual preferences however out of a shared love of advantage. We are able to outline advantage as “an inborn potential to pursue the nice, which will be developed from passive to lively.” That is the place the phrase liberal comes into the liberal arts philosophy of Boethius, as a result of liberos has to do with citizenship, being a part of a neighborhood. A very free liberos engages relationships for the sake of advantage: “And as for friendship, the purest type is counted as a mark not of excellent fortune, however of advantage.” (3.p2). We now have to cease and take into consideration this concept of freedom related to liberos. Within the historical metropolis state, in fact, it means these people who had standing to vote. However what’s actual freedom? When you’ve got no musical coaching and I put a guitar in your arms and say, play me “Stairway to Heaven,” you might be maybe politically free to strive, however you aren’t personally free to do it with out the constrained effort it takes to study that instrument. The virtues are thus actually liberating as a result of fulfilling their potential by the constraint of self-discipline frees one to undertake motion with higher precision. Girl Philosophy makes this level in regards to the virtues of the lifetime of the thoughts and their capability to free us from the day by day grind to consider God: “But when the thoughts stays acutely aware when it’s free of the earthly jail and seeks out heaven in freedom, certainly it is going to despise each earthly affair.” (2.p.7) So which means the lazier we’re, the much less we love God with our complete minds, the extra we’re enslaved: “Drifting and shedding mastery,/Has forged away his protect, has left his place,/And binds the chain with which he will likely be certain.” (1.m4)
[Slide 4] So with the releasing energy of virtues pursued for the sake of loving knowledge, we have now a liberal philosophy. Now we come to the phrase artwork. For the sake of expediency I’ll outline an artwork as a “technique developed for reworking a possible advantage into an precise advantage, or an precise advantage right into a extra disciplined and fulfilled advantage.” We frequently hear in regards to the thought of a liberal arts schooling as vaguely making college students “nicely rounded,” however a greater method to put it’s that the liberal arts had been codified from a thousand 12 months laboratory of philosophers asking, “What mental disciplines are most important to serving to people manifest the virtues which make their minds free?” Enter the Trivium, the three-fold path, and the Quadrivium, the four-fold path. Boethius coined the time period Quadrivium, and later Carolingian readers of Boethius coined the time period Trivium, though it was Martianus Capella, Boethius, and Cassiodorus who standardized their order, and an extended custom of students main as much as them, from Plato and Aristotle to the Stoics, who developed their content material. We might roughly characterize the Quadrivium because the maths and sciences—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—and the Trivium consists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Within the scheme depicted by Boethius and Cassiodorus, the Trivium was the trail by which the thoughts ordered its ideas about ideas, and the quadrivium the trail by which the thoughts ordered ideas about issues. No math or science could possibly be comprehended with out speech, and certainly no advantage could possibly be crafted or articulated with out language, and so the humanities of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which developed the virtues of communication, had been undoubtedly (this joke needs to be made) not trivial. In his discourse on wealth as a false good from Fortune’s Wheel, he makes the purpose of how little cash is price in comparison with good speech: “Whenever you converse, your complete voice fills the ears of many hearers to an equal extent, however your riches can not in the identical manner be shared equally amongst many with out diminution. When riches are shared amongst many it’s inevitable that they impoverish these from whom they move.” (2.p5) If I offer you twenty bucks, you could be completely satisfied about that, however now it’s simply gone. But when I inform you one thing true, I get to maintain the reality at the same time as I give it. In contrast to cash, knowledge is a wealth that grows within the sharing, and so clearly the humanities which educate us the right way to share knowledge are elementary to dwelling the nice life.
[Slide 5] So now we come again to Girl Philosophy, who as a personification possesses the complete powers of the Trivium and certainly lives and strikes and has her being inside grammar, logic, and rhetoric. She seems to banish the abusers of the powers of speech, the Muses: “Whereas I used to be considering these ideas to myself in silence…there appeared to face above my head a lady. Her look stuffed me with awe; her burning eyes penetrated extra deeply than these of unusual males…she was disturbed for a second, after which cried out with fiercely blazing eyes: ‘…These are they who choke the wealthy harvest of the fruits of purpose with the barren thorns of ardour…Get out, you Sirens, beguiling males straight to their destruction!’” (1.p1.3-5) As a logician, she rejects the results of the beguiling Muses who dampen the thoughts’s powers of clear considering, and as a rhetorician she brings to bear appropriate feelings of anger which make clear fairly than obfuscate the reality. And as a rhetorician she seems on her chief viewers, Boethius, with compassion, in search of to revive the grammar of identification: “…she gently laid her hand on my breast and mentioned: ‘… He has for a little bit forgotten his actual self. He’ll quickly recuperate—he did, in any case, know me earlier than—and to make this potential for him, let me for a short while clear his eyes of the mist of mortal affairs that clouds them.’ And so saying she gathered her gown right into a fold and dried my eyes, flowing as they had been with tears.” (1.p2) Casting out the Muses and wiping away the tears and bringing Boethius again to the humanities of reminiscence, Girl Philosophy demonstrates in a single dramatic motion the facility of the liberal arts to clear away the psychological darkness.
[Slide 6] And it’s not just for the sake of a extra dramatic portrayal than an essay can present that Girl Philosophy is depicted this manner. She is what Emporius the Orator would name an instance of ethopoeia—that’s to say, ethos-making, the persuasion of character imbued into an abstraction. Typically with personification we have a tendency to think about allegory, as in John Bunyan, however such interpretation treats personification as a purely grammatical veil for a logical relationship. Emporius exhibits us that personification will be rhetorical—persuasive. We’re not meant to see Philosophy as an allegory for philosophy. We are supposed to see her as forging an identification of who actual love of knowledge actually is. Like the scholars we see finding out the liberal arts within the picture from the twelfth century Backyard of Delights, Girl Philosophy is given an identification, and by giving her an identification, Boethius has made the virtuous love of knowledge he can determine with and so aspire to be. As a result of within the liberal arts philosophy, information just isn’t wanted merely to be identified, however to combine the information straight into the construction of character. So Girl Philosophy persuades us to expertise the liberal arts as websites of identification, and in so doing use the information in them as websites of self-fashioning. And since the chief set of liberal arts used to create a personification are the humanities of the Trivium, the primary query we are able to ask is, how does Girl Philosophy educate us to make use of grammar, logic, and rhetoric for the fashioning of an admirable self?
[Slide 7] Naturally, to be a personification, Girl Philosophy should exhibit the perform of grammar. Now, what advantage does grammar present? Cassiodorus tells us this: “Grammar is the talent of talking stylishly gathered from well-known poets and writers; its perform is to compose prose and verse with out fault … We now have left these so that you can learn, in order that the uneducated will lack nothing to arrange them for the heights of such nice information.” (Cassiodorus 2.1.75) Boethius, in his chief grammatical work, a commentary on Aristotle’s On Interpretation, boils grammar down to those two features: “important spoken sounds in as far as they signify ideas (conceptions) of the thoughts and ideas (intellectus).” (Boethius, On Aristotle On Interpretation, 17) Furthermore, “…these two, identify and verb, are to be thought to be correct components of a sentence, for they each signify in themselves…” (Boethius, 21) Grammar gives us with the facility to outline phrases and order these phrases in syntax. Grammar is how we make our minds take part within the that means we make out of encountering construction of actuality on the most elementary degree.
[Slide 8] Boethius had overpassed this perform, and his enslavement to the Muses present it. Have a look at the poem they compel him to jot down:
“I who as soon as wrote songs with joyful zeal/Am pushed by grief to enter weeping mode/See the Muses, cheeks all torn, dictate,/And moist my face with elegiac verse./No terror might discourage them at the least/From coming with me on my manner./They had been the glory of my completely satisfied youth/And nonetheless they consolation me in hapless age./Previous age got here abruptly by struggling sped,/And grief then bade her authorities start:/My hair premature white upon my head,/And I a worn out bone-bag hung with flesh./Dying can be blessing if it spared the glad/However heeded invocations from the wretch./However now Dying’s ears are deaf to hopeless cries,/His arms refuse to shut poor weeping eyes./Whereas with success false Fortune favoured me/One hour of unhappiness couldn’t have thrown me down,/However now her trustless countenance has clouded,/Small welcome to the times that lengthen life./Silly the buddies who referred to as me completely satisfied then:/For falling exhibits a person stood insecure.” (1.m1.3)
Boethius is passive earlier than the Muses, as in the event that they possess him like demons, indicated by Girl Philosophy’s assertion. Sure, they assist him to provide a poem, however it’s a poem which replaces definition with emotions—grief and insecurity turn into his identification fairly than something extra strong. Furthermore, he’s a person who “stood insecure.” The Muses had pressured him into an intransitive state, simply sitting in a state of being. Boethius’s thoughts has no lively attain for the true, the nice, or the attractive on this second. We learn, “she was disturbed for a second, after which cried out with fiercely blazing eyes: ‘…These are they who choke the wealthy harvest of the fruits of purpose with the barren thorns of ardour…Get out, you Sirens, beguiling males straight to their destruction!’” [Slide 9] However Girl Philosophy reminds him that actuality just isn’t merely intransitive. As human beings inside the cloth of creation, all of us must develop, to turn into. Correct Definition of Nature Forgotten: “He sought the rationale why spring hours/Are delicate with flowers manifest/And who enriched with swelling grapes/Ripe autumn on the filled with 12 months.” (1.m2.6)
Correct Definition of Nature Remembered: “And the way painstaking Nature is to make sure that all issues are propagated by the multiplication of their seed… We now have deduced that that’s goodness, and so we should agree that the tip of all issues is the nice.” (3.p.11) Solely God and the Void merely are, and the Muses clearly aren’t placing him in contact with the grammar of God. [Slide 10] Boethius has forgotten the correct syntax which God positioned within the cloth of actuality itself: “‘So inform me, do you bear in mind what’s the finish and goal of issues and the objective to which the entire course of nature is directed?’ ‘I did hear it as soon as,’ I mentioned, ‘however my reminiscence has been blunted by grief.’” (1.p7.19) This lack of syntax results in all of us changing into unnecessarily confused as we overlook the place true happiness is situated, not in an intransitive state however in lively participation:
The entire concern of males, which is the hassle of a mess of pursuits retains busy, strikes by completely different roads, but strives to reach at one and the identical finish, that of happiness…These, then, are the issues which individuals lengthy to acquire. And so they need riches, place, estates, glory and pleasures, as a result of it’s their conviction that by them they are going to obtain self-sufficiency, respect, energy, movie star and happiness. That is the nice that males are searching for in such a wide range of pursuits. And it’s not troublesome to point out the hand of nature on this, since despite the variability and distinction of their opinions, males are agreed of their selection of the nice as their objective. (3.p2)
We make the direct object of our needs every of these items, however as stewards we must be the topic and stewardship the verb we exert over our worldly items, which we are able to solely do if we get our religious syntax proper: “Every completely satisfied particular person is due to this fact divine. Whereas solely God is so by nature, as many as you want could turn into so by participation.” (3.p10) We’re all transitive, our syntax desires to take part in eternity. So right here’s the homework: How will we improperly outline our sense of that means as an intransitive expertise of momentary emotions, and so how will we fail because of this to grasp the correct syntax of our thought life as directed to God? What primary items of that means have we made our direct objects which set our sights decrease than eternity? And in so doing how have we didn’t submit ourselves to God as the actual topic of the sentence of existence?
[Slide 11] Logic likewise has a correct use, and Boethius has failed to make use of it correctly. Macrobius, whom Boethius had certainly learn, warned towards utilizing logic in a manner that cuts aside nature. Girl Philosophy warns Boethius of the dangerous philosophers who assert logic chopping on the expense of Girl Philosophy’s ethos: “…the gang of Epicureans and Stoics and the remainder strove so far as they may… carrying me off protesting and struggling, as if I had been a part of the booty, tearing my gown, which I wove with my very own arms, after which went off with their torn-off shreds, considering they possessed all of me.” (1.3.143) However the actual use of logic is to seek out wholeness. Girl Philosophy compares the correct use of logic to a fowl: “I shall affix to your thoughts wings, whereby it might increase itself aloft, in order that…you might return safely to your homeland, beneath my steerage, on my path, and in my carriage. For I’ve wings swiftly flying/Which might ascend the heights of heaven;/…I shall proceed by both path, confirming my propositions now from this aspect, now from that.” (4.1.86) There’s a soteriology within the syllogism when correctly used to not declare to personal Philosophy however to make use of the currents of the love of knowledge to discover the heights of reality. However due to this regard for the wholeness of the thoughts, which means the true thinker cares about saving appearances, in contrast to the pseudo-philosophers who callously assault the gown of Philosophia: “Lets, quoth she, body our speech to the vulgar phrase, lest we appear to have because it had been forsaken using human dialog?” (4.7.268) Our objective as logicians shouldn’t be to fancy up our phrases for its personal sake, however to hunt propositional readability that helps us to edify the widespread sense voice. How will we use logic to cut up the mind into dying as a substitute of build up the lifetime of the thoughts? How will we fail to deal with huge concepts as private and impersonally use them?
[Slide 12] This query of creating grammar and logic private in fact leads on to rhetoric, which is the artwork of audience-focused communication. Cassiodorus provides us a boilerplate definition: “Subsequently the orator is, as has been mentioned, ‘a very good man expert in talking’ in civil circumstances. The duty of the orator is to talk in such a manner as to influence; his objective is to influence by his method of talking, insofar as the character of the circumstances and the people concerned in civil circumstances appears to permit.” (Cassiodorus 2.2.178) Girl Philosophy doesn’t imagine within the idea of Fortune, however as a very good girl expert in talking, she is aware of that the person she is speaking to is within the circumstance of getting a thoughts disturbed by the idea. And so she speaks to him in regards to the idea on his personal phrases, nearly as good rhetoricians do, saying: “So allow us to use the candy persuasiveness of rhetoric, which might solely be stored on the appropriate path if it doesn’t swerve from our precepts…” So interesting to the audience-awareness potential of rhetoric, Girl Philosophy then depicts Dame Fortune: “For that is my nature, that is my continuous recreation: turning my wheel swiftly I delight to carry low what’s on excessive, to boost excessive what’s down. Go up, if you’ll, however on this situation, that you don’t actually suppose it a fallacious to must go down once more at any time when the course of my sport calls for.” (2.1-2.177-183). The overwhelming persuasions of Fortune depart the listener with no company, no likelihood to reply, as false gods don’t respect the Imago Dei. False gods don’t converse a listening phrase. In Ebook 5, Girl Philosophy then responds to Boethius’s concern that God’s foreknowledge makes our decisions so impregnably predestined that we have now nothing to say and that prayers are of no avail. However she reassures him that God in His sovereignty has made rhetoric potential by positioning Himself as an viewers, He who wants no persuading giving us a listening to nonetheless: “That is an outdated criticism about Windfall. Cicero attacked it vigorously in his treatise…The whole lot that’s identified is comprehended not in response to its personal nature, however in response to the flexibility to know of those that do the realizing… Keep away from vice, due to this fact, and domesticate advantage; carry up your thoughts to the correct of hope, and put forth humble prayers on excessive.” (5.4.124-6.137) As a result of God is aware of us, we’re in a position to be brokers of persuasion. To what extent have we didn’t relegate persuasion and let ourselves be compelled by the sensation of inevitability like Boethius earlier than Fortune’s Wheel once we must be performing as stewards of our domains, empowered to be persuaded with out being managed? Realizing that God not solely lets our prayers be heard however even permitted Devil himself to talk in his court docket within the Ebook of Job, how will we keep away from talking the deaf phrases of Fortune and provides as a substitute our speech the sturdy pliability that exhibits we all know the right way to take heed to in addition to converse to our viewers?
All of those classes come from Girl Philosophy, whom I’ve drawn for you in my little sketch that you simply see right here. [Slide 13] Ultimately, we’re the objects of ethopoeia—as we study the disciplines of the liberal arts and the potential for shaping character imbued in them, we study to determine with these personalities. We study to outline the sentence construction that may make our psychological lives lovely, to find the sanctifying energy of the syllogism in implementing our ideas into reality, and expertise and interact the powers of persuasion to advertise the nice. Boethius used the liberal arts to have a very good dying by writing a e book that defied the injustice which broke over him. Once we personify the liberal arts we flip round and discover that they’ve woke up our personalities, and rooted them so deeply within the love of knowledge, that when the enemies of knowledge come, we’ll know what to say and the right way to give a purpose for our perception that the liberal arts do encourage, empower, and exhort us to stay the nice life.
