Again, I think that you’re missing the fact that the very employment of the Menippean form indicates that there is some sort of critique or rethinking of a discipline. Marenbon and Relihan have both completed large studies of this and their findings are thoroughly backed, if not more than compelling. Thus, as my last comment indicated, if you see the function of the menippean form, not only in small sections, but in the work as a whole, then their claim isn’t all that surprising. But you have to grant the literary point first. It doesn’t seem that you’re willing to do so.

thanks again.

I think you’re reading me as making a stronger claim than I am. I don’t think reading the work as a Menippean satire excludes reading it as a dialogue (my first comment, remember, suggested that it needs to be read as both). My point is simply that if Boethius the character is being satirized, we have to be very careful in determining how the satire reflects on Lady Philosophy, since we have to at least consider the possibility that things we are identifying as ’satirizing Philosophy’ are really ‘indirectly satirizing Boethius the character, to whom Philosophy is responding’. A good example is Relihan’s interpretation of Boethius’s response to Philosophy at the beginning of IV.1; he argues that Boethius is poking fun of Philosophy. This is very plausible. But how should we interpret this in the context of the whole work? Is it a sign that Boethius is in a superior position to Philosophy (which is effectively what Marenbon and Relihan are arguing), or is it a sign that Boethius still doesn’t ‘get it’? From that particular passage alone we can’t decide one way or another. Another good example is the ‘gaps’ in Philosophy’s arguments. Are they due to limitations on the part of Philosophy herself or due to limitations on the part of Boethius (whom both Marenbon and Relihan recognize occasionally diverts Philosophy from her intended way of proceeding)? Is Boethius’s damning silence at the end of the work a sign of a failure of Philosophy or a failure of Boethius? And so forth. Taking these as evidence that Philosophy is satirized requires having decided on questions like these; and it is here where I find the arguments of Marenbon and Relihan surprisingly weak. And it’s these weaknesses in the argument for the position, and not the position itself (which might well be right), that I was arguing was worrisome.

I’m not sure why you seem to think the Menippean format is exclusive to reading the Consolation as dialogue, or if that’s even what you’re saying. I tried to show that a sensitive reading will accomodate both. Whether I’m successful or not at that, I’ll leave you to judge. But I’m not sure that I see you accounting for the Menippean genre, which includes dialogue and satire, as well as poetry and song. if you take this genre and the way it functions seriously, and the fact that as in Capella’s _marriage of mercury and philology_ the genre is used often to work out meta issues – as the Socratic dialogues often are…. I’m thinking ION here – like the relationships of disciplines, then hopefully you begin to see what I’ve been trying to say here, that Boethius is not merely trying to work out issues of providence and time, but also trying to make a statement about the way Philosophy works and how much she’s able to cash out her claims. Even if you don’t take Menippean satire seriously as having a substantive contribution to the thrust of the Consolation, I think Relihan and Marenbon are right to point to Boethius’ damning silence at the end of the Consolation as a tell tale sign of this meta function.

One of the things, actually the most important thing, that I was trying to bring out in the paper is that there’s something new going on in Boethius’ use of the Menippean Satire that is not happening in didactic or even dialogical material. The poems are indicative of this. Nevertheless, you’re not alone, as I go to lengths to demonstrate at the beginning of the paper, if you read the poems as ancillary or supporting to the prose sections. But if you feel up to squaring off against Joel Relihan and John Marenbon, and in Nyssen scholarship Rowan Williams, then be my guest.

Thanks again for the challenging questions.

I think the claim that ‘this seems to be the case only at the beginning and not at the end’ is a bit debatable; Boethius, for instance, rather consistently tries to divert Philosophy’s discussion throughout the work away from himself into topics he is interested in. No doubt it becomes less obvious as the work continues; but this fits, in fact, with Philosophy’s theme of progressive cure. So I think we have to be careful not to be too quick here.

I do think there’s a possibility that the author’s satirizing them both; I think it’s much more obvious (particularly at the start of the work, but not only there) that he’s satirizing Boethius, and because of this I think we need to be careful to apportion the satirizing properly. If Boethius is being satirized, then we have to take into account that we can’t always take Boethius’s own comments on and responses to Philosophy with straightfaced literalness, because (for instance) if Boethius pokes fun at Philosophy (as Relihan suggests he is doing at the beginning of IV.1) we have to be open to the possibility that this is like Callicles’s mockery of Socrates: in context it’s really the mocker being mocked. We’d also have to take into account the possibility that certain features of Philosophy’s strategy and response to Boethius (e.g., the occasionally disjointed thread of discussion) are due not to herself but to the fact that she has to compensate for the absurdities of Boethius. It’s true that after we’ve taken into account things like this, we may still have a residue that shows that Philosophy is being satirized, but I think only after we’ve done this can we be sure we are not reading into it.

I agree that Philosophy is often hilarious; but there are ways of being hilarious that are not satirical. (Socrates, again, is an example.)

I want to thank all of you for your contribution to the discussion this late in the series. I appreciate all of your intelligent comments and look forward to further conversation with you all beyond this.

I think Josh and Peter’s discussion needs to be further explored and isn’t something that I want to jump into at this point.

Brandon, I agree with you, that Boethius has something of Socrates in mind. The connection between their biographies can’t be missed, especially their final fate.

However, there is something of authorship that I want to keep in mind. Boethius is writing his final legacy in this, whereas Socrates as far as we know doesn’t leave us with anything but his star pupil’s writing. This matters, I think, because the Boethius of the Consolation is not the Boethius the author. Marenbon, in the a rather conservative reading I think, is strident in making this point.

So, I don’t see how this lessens your point that antique philosophy and its dialogue roots need to be kept in mind. Menippean satire is not a challenge to antique philosophy unless you think that antique philosophy is exhaustive and stands alone.

As for whether Boethius is satirizing himself versus Philosophy, I’d remark that this seems to be the case only at the beginning and not at the end. Besides, Philosophy is hilarious at the beginning – see my quote at the beginning of my first post in the series. Why can’t it be that he’s satirizing them both.

Lastly, something I intend to pursue further in the future, what is the significance of having not only a fictional character to dialogue with, but moreover a mythological and nearly goddesslike character? My gut is that he’s trying to make a programmatic and (possibly) universal statement about the humanities in general, and not just his life and fate. What better way to end one’s life than to reshape the humanities?

Thanks again for all your comments!

Best,

Dan

I’ve been attracted by Marenbon’s and Relihan’s approach (leaning more toward Marenbon’s version), but I’ve had two worries I’ve never been able to shake:

One thing that has always bothered me about both Marenbon’s and Relihan’s interpretation is that they focus (almost) wholly on the issue of how Boethius might be using satire to explore the limitations of Philosophy, when in fact there seems to be a very good argument that its primary purpose is to explore the limitations of Boethius himself. In fact, Boethius is pretty clearly satirizing himself from the very opening moments of the book. The work may in addition be exploring the limitations of Philosophy, but before we can trace out how it has done so (if there is much to trace out), it has always seemed to me that it is futile to do so before we’ve taken into account how it has explored the limitations of human foible.

The second worry I have, more recent, is that in all this focus on the Menippean form certain things are getting lost. One reason that might be given for the old straight-laced reading of the work is that we should read it in light of Plato’s dialogues, especially the Gorgias, with which it has a number of explicit textual links and structural parallels (the most obvious example of the latter is that they both end very much the same way, with the same thematic notes and similar images; but there are others). Now, there is humor and satire in the Gorgias as well, with Socrates himself coming in for some of it; but no one thinks (as far as I know) that Plato is trying to show that Socrates’s response to the Sophists is limited. Rather, he is arguably just aware that people who have not fully understood Socrates’s view and been persuaded by it will not see the full scope of it and therefore will regard parts of it as odd; there is a sense in which any satirizing of Socrates in the dialogue is itself being satirized, as is any tendency of Plato’s audience to sympathize with the notion that Socrates is absurd. Ideally what we need is an interpretation of the Consolation that takes not only its satire form but its Platonic roots seriously at the same time. And I’m not really convinced that either Marenbon or Relihan have managed to do this.

Thanks for your input.

I’m not bent on reading Boethius as a medieval Scholastic. On the other hand, I’m extremely skeptical of any reading of the Consolation that interprets it as entirely “subverting” philosophy, as Relihan would apparently have it. Such a reading is especially problematic given that Boethius appears to take many of Philosophy’s arguments dead seriously. The fact that he argues with her is certainly no indication that he repudiates philosophy, since such argument is the bread and butter of philosophical analysis.

Even so, I also take seriously the point, suggested by Boethius’s ultimate silence in the face of Philosophy’s questioning, that it may very well be the view of the Consolation that philosophy alone can’t lead us to apprehend the good and thereby to enjoy true happiness. Faith and prayer are indispensable. Yet that point doesn’t preclude philosophy from still being able to tell us something about the good and other ultimate matters. Consequently, I don’t see why it’s so far-fetched to regard Boethius as anticipating the later Scholastic distinction between philosophy as natural theology and revelation. I never said that Boethius draws that exact distinction, but to my mind there are sufficient resonances with it to regard him as a precursor. If that reading is entirely wrong, then I expect a convincing argument to the contrary. So far we haven’t gotten it.

As for assuming that “a certain reading is normative simply because of time,” I agree that we shouldn’t make uncritical assumptions about historical context. Nonetheless, historical context matters. To think that someone like Boethius, who’s deeply influenced by the philosophical optimism of Plato and his immediate predecessor Augustine, is actually bent on using poetry to toss philosophy out the window strains credibility–no less than the idea that Plato is using the dialogue form to throw metaphysics out the window. Satirical elements may very well be present in the Consolation. But let’s not fall prey to the anachronistic fallacy of trying to turn it into a piece of post-modern poeisis.

Peter

I read through the ealrier comments and had the benefit of listening as Dan constructed this project earlier in the year. So this conversation has prompted some interesting thoughts that I, as an ancient historian, did not consider. My thoughts then are from my own perspective and meant to add fuel to the dialogue.

1) Why must Boethius be a ‘Medieval’ scholastic? In the previous posts Peter seemed bent on maintaining B’s location in the Scholastic line. Now in this post, he tempers that by describing B as a “precursor.” First, there is clearly still debate on when we can talk of the Middle Ages. I would think B considered himself still Roman, and clearly not in turmoil pre-Carolingian period. That said I think we can see, as we do with Benedict, a new world emerging in B. In that sense they are both liminal figures, not quite Classical, and not quite Medieval. Second, any attempt to categorize B in the Schiolastic frame is completely anachronistic. We can see the seed of similar ideas, but I think that is due to readings by later writers, not B himself. I think we can say B is a precursor simply in the same way Augustine is a the foundation…their works were in Latin and accesible. What else would they have read!

2) Genre and exegesis: In an earlier post Peter commented that he would not be convinced except for by strong exegetical treatment of the text itself (my words, so if I am off please excuse my reading). It seems to me Dan is bring the generic form back into a reading of B that has been overlooked in most of the scholarship. If this is indeed a form of Satire, then how does that change our reading? To assume that a certain raading is normative simply because of time, is to commit the same fallacy as saying a text is only defined by its genre and not content. Students of Late Antiquity have for decades recognized the creativity of the author to both praise an idea and subvert it in the same treatise, why can this not be the case for B? (See Avril Cameron’s landmark work Rhetoric and Empire).

Anyways, thoughts for the mill. Thanks, Dan, Peter for the dialogue and Cynthia for hosting and keeping the debate going!
Josh

Thank you for posting this additional material on the use of the Menippean form in the Consolation.

On a more radical Menippean reading like Relihan’s, according to which Boethius’s silence in the face of Philosophy’s argumentation at the end of the Consolation indicates a “parting of the ways” between the two, what does one make of Marenbon’s point that, as you put it, “Philosophy makes powerful arguments that Boethius does in fact accept”? Why should we read Boethius’s silence as a repudiation of these arguments, rather than as a realization that Philosophy can’t prove everything about the good?

You observe that Boethius and Philosophy agree that true happiness doesn’t consist in attaining goods like temporal power, self-sufficiency, fame, honor, physical health, and so forth. True happiness consists, rather, in attaining some higher good. I take this to be a philosophical result, albeit primarily a negative one because it doesn’t specify the nature of the higher good in a manner that also enables one to attain it.

This suggests, contra Relihan, that for Boethius philosophy still has a legitimate role to play by indicating, as Cynthia suggested, that there is a higher good and that it is not any of these other worldly goods. (Philosophy may also shed some light in other areas by showing that there need be no incompatibility between divine foreknowledge and human freedom, or that God is timeless.) However, it is not philosophy but faith nourished by prayer which leads us actually to attain the higher good, and hence true happiness, as far as we are humanly able. Such a view would seem to make Boethius an important precursor to the later medieval distinction between revelation and reason (philosophy as natural theology).

Like Cynthia, I’m no expert about Boethius or the Consolations, so I look forward to your further contributions.

Best regards,

Peter