…twelfth-century Latin translations of the Meno and the Phaedo by Henricus Aristippus (d. 1162). However, the importance of patristic and other major authors writing in Latin as transmitters of Platonic thought remained undiminished, with the Consolatio playing a key role. As in the earlier period, this text exerted its influence both directly (in the original or in translation) and through commentaries. Of these, the most influential seems to have been the Latin commentary of Nicholas Trevet, a work which incorporates material from both Alfred's Boethius and William of Conches' Commentator. Trevet's commentary was an important source for Chaucer's Boece (a prose translation of the Consolatio, which draws also on Jean de Meun's Li Livres de Confort) and for John Walton's Boethius (1410, a verse rendering which in its turn uses material from Chaucer). 5
The importance of Boethius as the mediator of Greek philosophical learning to the Christian Western world cannot be overestimated. His writings reveal a profound intellectual debt to both Plato and the Neoplatonists, Indeed, the essential shape of the Consolatio has been described as 'a Neoplatonic thesis that the imperfections of this world are allowed to facilitate the return of the soul to its origin in God'. 6 The Platonic doctrines of Recollection and the Ascent of the Soul are combined and interpreted in terms of Plotinus' ascent of the soul to its original home. The questions 'If there is a God, whence comes evil? But whence comes good, if there is not?' are taken from Proclus (Parmenides 1056; Consolatio, I. pr.iv.105-6) along with a belief in foreknowledge by God, to whom everything is known, outside time, in the simultaneity of eternity (Consolatio, v. pr. vi.). God is seen to be working through Fate. However, while there are no overt references to Christian doctrines, such as the remission of sins, redemption, or eternal life, there is nothing of Plato that cannot also be found in Augustine.7
There are many reasons why Alfred should have chosen to make available to his people an English version of the Consolatio, a philosophical work of great power, originality and authority, coloured by its author's personal tragedy. Nearly 700 years later another English monarch - Queen Elizabeth I - was to undertake the same
5 See Boethius. His Life, Thought and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson (Oxford, 1981) and The Medieval Boethius. Studies in the Vernacular Translations of De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. A.J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1987).
6 H. Chadwick, 'Introduction', Boethius, ed. Gibson, p. 11.
7 See further Boethius, ed. Gibson, Part I, also Henry Chadwick, Boethius. The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford, 1981, reprinted 1990).
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Any generalisation about the knowledge of Greek texts in medieval England is fraught with danger. However, it would appear that during the first half of that period acquaintance with the works of Plato was at second or even third hand, through the writings of authors such as Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Augustine, Boethius and (via Calcidius' translation of the Timaeus) John Scotus Eriugena, and through Latin and Old English texts drawing on one or other of these writings. The most important contribution in the vernacular was provided by the late ninth century reworking of Boethius' De consolatione Philosophiae 1 by Alfred, King of Wessex, 2 though Platonic or Neoplatonic ideas are also found in Alfred's Soliloquies (by way of Augustine) and in a couple of Old English homilies (by way of Alfred's Boethius). 4 The earliest secure evidence for knowledge of the Consolatio in England is provided by Alfred's Boethius, although, thanks apparently to the Englishman Alcuin, it was being read on the continent from the Carolingian Renaissance onward. The works of Macrobius and Martianus Capella had also become known in England by the end of the ninth century, while commentaries on Capella and Boethius were in circulation there by the beginning of the tenth.
In the later medieval period, Calcidius' Timaeus was joined by the
1 Boethius, ed. H.F. Stewart, E.K. Rand (1918), revised and trans. by S.J. Tester (London, 1973, reprinted 1978). Referred to hereafter as Consolatio.
2 King Alfred's Old English Version of Boethius‘ De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. Walter John Sedgefield (Oxford, 1899). Referred to hereafter as Boethius.
3 King Alfred's Version of St Augustine's Soliloquies, ed. Thomas A. Carnicelli (Harvard, 1969), especially p. 911-4.
4 See M.R. Godden, 'Anglo-Saxons on the Mind', Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 296-8. Boethian ideas have also been detected (sometimes controversially) in a range of Old English poems.
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… Yet Alfred's is no close translation in the modern sense of the word. Rather, it is a reinterpretation, made in the light of his experience and obligations as a medieval Christian king, reflecting his own personal quest for an answer to the problems of a world in which evil and sin often seemed to have the upper hand. Even in the central discussions of Fate, Fortune, Freewill and Providence major differences emerge between the attitudes of the two men. Alfred certainly follows Boethius in his acceptance of Fate as the agent by which God's providence works out its will in the temporal world. However, he parts from Boethius in his emphasis on a personal God who is very clearly the Christian God. So, for instance, where Boethius takes from the Neoplatonists the image of concentric circles to represent Providence and Fate (Consolatio, iv.pr.vi.65-82), Alfred, introducing the Augustinian theme of the soul yearning for God, but reaching Him only through contemptus mundi (contempt for the world), uses instead the image of a cartwheel. Its axle represents God and the nave, spokes and fellies represent men, who are graded as the best, the middle sort and the least worthy, according to the extent to which they set their love near to God and despise earthly things (Boethius, 129.19-130.27). And as his ultimate answer to the problems of the secret workings of fate and fortune Alfred produces the doctrine of merit of man (Boethius, 69. I 7-23).9 On another occasion, Alfred preserves Boethius' references to recollection along with his Neoplatonist emphasis on self-knowledge, the turning-in upon itself of the soul:
Whoever wishes to search deeply with inward mind after right and does not wish to be hindered by any man or any thing, let him begin to seek within himself what he previously sought outside. . . For no heaviness of the body nor any vice can completely take away the righteousness from his mind, so that he does not have something of it in his mind, though the sluggishness of the body and the vices often trouble the mind with forgetfulness and lead it astray with the mist of error, so that it cannot shine as brightly as it would, and nevertheless a grain of the seed of truth is ever dwelling in the soul while the soul and the body are united. (Boethius, 94.27-95.14)
For, he continues,
it is a very true saying that the philosopher Plato spoke: 'Whoever', he said, 'is unmindful of righteousness, let him turn to his memory; then he will find the righteousness there, concealed by the weight of the body and by the tribulations and preoccupations of his mind'. (Boethius, 95.19-23)10
However, Alfred's rendering of this and the passage immediately following (Consolatio, III pr. xii. 1-4; Boethius, 95.24-31) contains no detail that requires interpretation in the light of Plato's Doctrine of Pre-existence, the emphasis being on forgetfulness by man of his essential righteousness.
In his version of Consolatio, IV. m. I, in contrast, Alfred preserves Boethius' reference to the soul's recollection of a former home. This meter begins with a description of the mind putting on Philosophia's wings and being borne aloft - itself an important Platonic image and one which is not only retained here by Alfred but may well have influenced him in the beautiful and original simile of the eagle that he puts into the mouth of Wisdom in Book II: 'But when I travel up with my servants, then we scorn this stormy world, just like the eagle, when he soars up in stormy weather above the clouds so that the storms cannot harm him (Boethius, 18. I 1-14). On that occasion, Wisdom expresses a willingness to take Mod ('Mind', alias Boethius) up with…
ALFRED'S BOETHIUS
It is not possible to do justice here to all the modifications and changes made by Alfred in his rendering of the Consolatio8 and the variety of ways in which he handles those materials which Boethius himself had inherited from the Platonists. Exploration of three linked themes must suffice by way of illustration: the Platonic doctrines of the Pre-existence of the Soul, Recollection and the Ascent of the Soul. These, as we have seen, are doctrines which Boethius, following the Neoplatonists, explicitly associated together in the Consolatio, and Alfred reacts to them in a variety of ways. On one occasion where Boethius' Philosophia describes all human kind as from one origin, one father, who 'locked into limbs spirits brought down from their high abode' (Consolatio, III.m.vi.5), her English counterpart, Wisdom (alias Reason) summarises instead Christian teachings on the creation 8 Book length studies include K. Otten, Kunig Alfred’s Boethius (Tubingen, 1964), and F. Anne Payne, King Alfred and Boethius (Madison and London, 1968).
9 Cf. Alfred's transformation of Book III. m. ix, 'O qui perpetua' (which draws heavily on Plato, Timaeus, and Proclus), into what is essentially a celebration of God and His creation, with the Platonic World Soul reinterpreted as the human soul.
10 Cf. Consolatio, ... m. xi 1-16, which concludes: If Plato's muse rings true, What each man learns, forgetful he recalls.
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him - provided he return to earth again, for the sake of good men. In Consolatio, IV. m. 1, the soul, once it has ascended to 'the outside of the swift upper air' speaks only of remaining: If the road bring you back, returning to this place, Which you now seek, forgetful, 'This,' you will say, 'I remember, is my native land, Here I was born, here I shall halt my step'. (Consolatio, IV. m. i. 23-6)
In Alfred's version of this meter, Wisdom comments similarly:
But if you ever come on that path and to that place that you have yet forgotten, then you will wish to say, 'This is my true homeland; I had formerly come from here and from here I was born; I now intend to stand fast here; I do not wish ever to depart from here'. (Boethius 105.20-4)
And in yet another striking passage the idea of a return home is actually inserted by Alfred, bringing together the themes of recollection and the ascent of the soul in an expansion of Philosophia's exhortation, 'Let us be raised up, if we can, to the height of that highest intelligence' (Consolatio, v. pr.5. 50). Having rendered this with some fidelity 'Let us now raise our minds as high as we can towards the high roof of the highest intelligence', he puts into Wisdom's mouth the further comment 'so that you may most speedily and easily come to your own home from where you previously came' (Boethius, 146.26-9).
The ideas of ascent and a journey home are also combined by Alfred in his version ofConsolatio, III. Pr.2.54, where Boethius uses his celebrated simile of the drunken man: 'man's mind, though the memory of it is clouded, yet does seek again its proper good, but like a drunken man cannot find by what path it may return home'). Alfred's extended version introduces the image of a steep slope:
Now then although their minds and their natures are dimmed, and they have sunk down on the descent to evil and are inclined thither, nevertheless they desire the highest good, as far as they know how and are able to.J ust as a drunken man knows that he should go to his house and to his rest and yet cannot find the way thither, so it is with the mind when it is made heavy by the cares of this world; it is sometimes intoxicated and led astray by them, to the extent that it cannot very directly find the way to good (or God?) (Boethius 55.15-22)
We may compare Chaucer's exploitation of Boethius' drunken-man image in a very different context in the Knight's Tale (C.1382), where Arcite, having succeeded in obtaining his liberty, realises that he has in the process deprived himself of what was in fact even more important to him - sight of Emily.
We witen nat what thing we preyen heere:
We faren as he that dronke is as a mous.
A dronke man woot wel he hath an hous,
But he noot which the righte wey is thider,
And to a dronke man the wey is slider.
And certes, in this world so faren we;
We seken faste after felicite…
(11.1260-6)
Perhaps the most interesting example of use of the Platonic doctrine of the Ascent of the Soul in Alfred's Boethius is, however, in the rendering of Book III. m. xii, a meter where the turning back of Orpheus as he leaves the Underworld is used - under the influence of the allegory of the Cave in Plato's Republic - to portray the failure of a soul in its ascent towards the light. According to Boethius' version the fable is intended for those who seek to lead their mind into the upper day:
For he who overcome should turn back his gaze
Towards the Tartarean cave,
Whatever excellence he takes with him
He loses when he looks on those below.
Alfred's Wisdom both provides a different moral and shows greater compassion to the backslider:
these false tales teach every man who wishes to flee from the darkness of hell
and come to the light of the true goodness (or God) that he should not look
round at his old sins, so that he again commits them as fully as he once did.
For whoever with entire will turns his mind to the sins that he previously
abandoned and then fully commits them, and they then fully please him, and
he does not think ever to forsake them, then he will lose all his former good,
unless he atones for it again. (Boethius, 103.14-21)
In a rewriting of a reference by Fortuna to her wheel (Consolatio, n.pr.2, 28-gg).Just as Bqethius has no place for Plato's gods in his system, so Alfred does not accept the personifications Fortuna and Natura.
12 The Riverside Chaucer, grd edn, ed. L. Benson (Oxford, 1988).
13 For the interpretations in contemporary commentaries, see Joseph S. Wittig, 'King Alfred's Boethius and its Latin Sources, a Reconsideration', I I (1983), Anglo-Saxon England, 157-98.
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lnal punishment is the reward for evil, which Wisdom describes as misuse of the freedom God has given to men (Boethius, 113.21-2).14
Alfred's God is a merciful God who allows for repentance fthius, 143.22-9) and there are plenty of escape clauses here for the 1 than hardened sinner. Platonic thought, as transmitted by :thius, has been adapted and transformed by a medieval king, ling for himself and his people a deeper understanding of man's ce in the scheme of things.