The Trivium and the Good Life in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy

Anthony G. Cirilla

Editor’s Note: This essay comes out of a talk that Dr. Cirilla gave at the 2024 The Classical Thistle Conference. We have included directives towards slides in the linked PowerPoint as a way of blending written essay with the visual aids of the slide deck used in the presentation.

Why study the liberal arts? Why study them in a culture which increasingly devalues their importance? What good can the liberal arts serve us in a world that demands results when their study is so slow and painstaking? As Chaucer once wrote of poetry, “So short the life, so long the craft to learn.” What does a classical education have to offer when devotion may not only make you seem quaint and a bit behind the times but even an obstacle to progress? And when the light of evening fades and we prepare to surrender our final breath, what value will studying the liberal arts have yielded? Although questions relevant to us today, these questions were also directly and personally relevant to the subject of this essay, Boethius.

Fifteen hundred years ago, in 524, Boethius found himself thrown into imprisonment by the Ostrogothic King and Senate he had faithfully served. His conspicuous political success had been built on his achievements in the liberal arts, both the Trivium and the Quadrivium, especially in the arts of logic, rhetoric, geometry, and music, the fountainhead of wisdom he had also pulled on in his political decisions. He had undertaken his political duties with faith that studying the liberal arts would make him a better public servant, and make Rome a more unified place. And when King Theodoric, who had appointed him as Master of Offices in a role directly tied to this role of promoter of liberal arts education, saw Boethius stand up for his friend on the basis of the virtues those arts had instilled in him, Theodoric let him take the fall. No trial, no justice. Imprisonment and the death penalty for doing the right thing, doing it the way he did and believing it the way he did because of his training in those same liberal arts that, one could say, got him killed. So it was no theoretical question: Was all of that studying really worth it?

[Slide 2] It’s important to remember, when you hear the title Consolation of Philosophy, that this book was written by someone on death row essentially for studying the concept in the title. Boethius took very seriously the etymology of Philosophy, the Love of Wisdom, from his youth up, and this is the emotional weight behind his recognition that she has appeared to him: “I turned my eyes and fixed my gaze upon her, and I saw it was my nurse in whose house I had been cared for since my youth – Philosophy.” Philosophy is the culmination of the study of the liberal arts, and so when the personification of Lady Philosophy appears to Boethius, she is not only consoling him about the problem of evil understood theologically—Why did God let this happen?—though that was of course the question. But the problem of evil had become intensely pedagogical—did the liberal arts really help Boethius to live a good life? Philosophy’s answer is of course yes: “This is hardly the first time Wisdom has been threatened with danger by the forces of evil… when their forces attack us in superior numbers, our general [Wisdom] conducts a tactical withdrawal… to a stronghold [arce]…” (1.p3) Philosophy speaks as those arts in the flesh so to speak, there to answer that very question on her own behalf. So when we discuss the role of the Trivium in the good life for Boethius, it is of the utmost importance that we consider why he chose to put the better part of his Consolation in the words of this dazzling personification and her defense of the liberal arts philosophy.

[Slide 3] So let’s start there, talking about what Boethius would mean by a liberal arts philosophy. We mentioned that the word philosophy means the love of wisdom, and the fact that he decided to personify philosophy means he takes the word “love” very seriously—loving wisdom not only as a concept but as if it were a person, as if we could have a relationship with philosophy the way we could have a relationship with a friend. Friendship is likewise important to Boethius, as true friendship is not merely a result of circumstance or mutual preferences but out of a shared love of virtue. We can define virtue as “an inborn ability to pursue the good, which can be developed from passive to active.” This is where the word liberal comes into the liberal arts philosophy of Boethius, because liberos has to do with citizenship, being part of a community. A truly free liberos engages relationships for the sake of virtue: “And as for friendship, the purest kind is counted as a mark not of good fortune, but of virtue.” (3.p2). We have to stop and think about this idea of freedom associated with liberos. In the ancient city state, of course, it means those individuals who had standing to vote. But what is real freedom? If you have no musical training and I put a guitar in your hands and say, play me “Stairway to Heaven,” you are perhaps politically free to try, but you are not personally free to do it without the constrained effort it takes to learn that instrument. The virtues are thus literally liberating because fulfilling their potential through the constraint of discipline frees one to undertake action with greater precision. Lady Philosophy makes this point about the virtues of the life of the mind and their capacity to free us from the daily grind to think about God: “But if the mind stays conscious when it is freed from the earthly prison and seeks out heaven in freedom, surely it will despise every earthly affair.” (2.p.7) So this means that the lazier we are, the less we love God with our whole minds, the more we are enslaved: “Drifting and losing mastery,/Has cast away his shield, has left his place,/And binds the chain with which he will be bound.” (1.m4)

[Slide 4] So with the freeing power of virtues pursued for the sake of loving wisdom, we have a liberal philosophy. Now we come to the word art. For the sake of expediency I will define an art as a “method developed for transforming a potential virtue into an actual virtue, or an actual virtue into a more disciplined and fulfilled virtue.” We often hear about the idea of a liberal arts education as vaguely making students “well rounded,” but a better way to put it is that the liberal arts were codified from a thousand year laboratory of philosophers asking, “What intellectual disciplines are most essential to helping individuals 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 term Quadrivium, and later Carolingian readers of Boethius coined the term Trivium, although it was Martianus Capella, Boethius, and Cassiodorus who standardized their order, and a long tradition of scholars leading up to them, from Plato and Aristotle to the Stoics, who developed their content. We could roughly characterize the Quadrivium as the maths and sciences—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—and the Trivium consists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In the scheme depicted by Boethius and Cassiodorus, the Trivium was the path by which the mind ordered its thoughts about thoughts, and the quadrivium the path by which the mind ordered thoughts about things. No math or science could be comprehended without speech, and indeed no virtue could be crafted or articulated without language, and so the arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which developed the virtues of communication, were definitely (this joke has to be made) not trivial. In his discourse on wealth as a false good from Fortune’s Wheel, he makes the point of how little money is worth compared to good speech: “When you speak, your whole voice fills the ears of many hearers to an equal extent, but your riches cannot in the same way be shared equally among many without diminution. When riches are shared among many it is inevitable that they impoverish those from whom they pass.” (2.p5) If I give you twenty bucks, you may well be happy about that, but now it’s just gone. But if I tell you something true, I get to keep the truth even as I give it. Unlike money, wisdom is a wealth that grows in the sharing, and so clearly the arts which teach us how to share wisdom are fundamental to living the good life.

[Slide 5] So now we come back to Lady Philosophy, who as a personification possesses the full powers of the Trivium and indeed lives and moves and has her being within grammar, logic, and rhetoric. She appears to banish the abusers of the powers of speech, the Muses: “While I was thinking these thoughts to myself in silence…there seemed to stand above my head a woman. Her look filled me with awe; her burning eyes penetrated more deeply than those of ordinary men…she was disturbed for a moment, and then cried out with fiercely blazing eyes: ‘…These are they who choke the rich harvest of the fruits of reason with the barren thorns of passion…Get out, you Sirens, beguiling men straight to their destruction!’” (1.p1.3-5) As a logician, she rejects the effects of the beguiling Muses who dampen the mind’s powers of clear thinking, and as a rhetorician she brings to bear suitable emotions of anger which clarify rather than obfuscate the truth. And as a rhetorician she looks on her chief audience, Boethius, with compassion, seeking to restore the grammar of identity: “…she gently laid her hand on my breast and said: ‘… He has for a little forgotten his real self. He will soon recover—he did, after all, know me before—and to make this possible for him, let me for a little while clear his eyes of the mist of mortal affairs that clouds them.’ And so saying she gathered her dress into a fold and dried my eyes, flowing as they were with tears.” (1.p2) Casting out the Muses and wiping away the tears and bringing Boethius back to the arts of memory, Lady Philosophy demonstrates in one dramatic action the power of the liberal arts to clear away the mental darkness.

[Slide 6] And it is not only for the sake of a more dramatic portrayal than an essay can provide that Lady Philosophy is depicted this way. She is what Emporius the Orator would call an example of ethopoeia—that is to say, ethos-making, the persuasion of personality imbued into an abstraction. Often with personification we tend to think of allegory, as in John Bunyan, but such interpretation treats personification as a purely grammatical veil for a logical relationship. Emporius shows us that personification can be rhetorical—persuasive. We are not meant to see Philosophy as an allegory for philosophy. We are meant to see her as forging an identity of who real love of wisdom really is. Like the students we see studying the liberal arts in the image from the 12th century Garden of Delights, Lady Philosophy is given an identity, and by giving her an identity, Boethius has made the virtuous love of wisdom he can identify with and so aspire to be. Because in the liberal arts philosophy, knowledge is not sought after simply to be known, but to integrate the knowledge directly into the structure of personality. So Lady Philosophy persuades us to experience the liberal arts as sites of identity, and in so doing use the knowledge in them as sites of self-fashioning. And because the chief set of liberal arts used to create a personification are the arts of the Trivium, the first question we can ask is, how does Lady Philosophy teach us to use grammar, logic, and rhetoric for the fashioning of an admirable self?

[Slide 7] Naturally, to be a personification, Lady Philosophy must exhibit the function of grammar. Now, what virtue does grammar provide? Cassiodorus tells us this: “Grammar is the skill of speaking stylishly gathered from famous poets and writers; its function is to compose prose and verse without fault … We have left these for you to read, so that the uneducated will lack nothing to prepare them for the heights of such great knowledge.” (Cassiodorus 2.1.75) Boethius, in his chief grammatical work, a commentary on Aristotle’s On Interpretation, boils grammar down to these two functions: “significant spoken sounds in so far as they signify concepts (conceptions) of the mind and thoughts (intellectus).” (Boethius, On Aristotle On Interpretation, 17) Moreover, “…these two, name and verb, are to be regarded as proper parts of a sentence, for they both signify in themselves…” (Boethius, 21) Grammar provides us with the power to define words and order those words in syntax. Grammar is how we make our minds participate in the meaning we make out of encountering structure of reality at the most fundamental level.

[Slide 8] Boethius had lost sight of this function, and his enslavement to the Muses show it. Look at the poem they compel him to write:

“I who once wrote songs with joyful zeal/Am driven by grief to enter weeping mode/See the Muses, cheeks all torn, dictate,/And wet my face with elegiac verse./No terror could discourage them at least/From coming with me on my way./They were the glory of my happy youth/And still they comfort me in hapless age./Old age came suddenly by suffering sped,/And grief then bade her government begin:/My hair untimely white upon my head,/And I a worn out bone-bag hung with flesh./Death would be blessing if it spared the glad/But heeded invocations from the wretch./But now Death’s ears are deaf to hopeless cries,/His hands refuse to close poor weeping eyes./While with success false Fortune favoured me/One hour of sadness could not have thrown me down,/But now her trustless countenance has clouded,/Small welcome to the days that lengthen life./Foolish the friends who called me happy then:/For falling shows a man stood insecure.” (1.m1.3)

Boethius is passive before the Muses, as if they possess him like demons, indicated by Lady Philosophy’s assertion. Yes, they help him to produce a poem, but it is a poem which replaces definition with feelings—grief and insecurity become his identity rather than anything more robust. Moreover, he is a man who “stood insecure.” The Muses had forced him into an intransitive state, just sitting in a state of being. Boethius’s mind has no active reach for the true, the good, or the beautiful in this moment. We read, “she was disturbed for a moment, and then cried out with fiercely blazing eyes: ‘…These are they who choke the rich harvest of the fruits of reason with the barren thorns of passion…Get out, you Sirens, beguiling men straight to their destruction!’” [Slide 9] But Lady Philosophy reminds him that reality is not merely intransitive.  As human beings within the fabric of creation, we all need to grow, to become. Proper Definition of Nature Forgotten: “He sought the reason why spring hours/Are mild with flowers manifest/And who enriched with swelling grapes/Ripe autumn at the full of year.” (1.m2.6)

Proper Definition of Nature Remembered: “And how painstaking Nature is to ensure that all things are propagated by the multiplication of their seed… We have deduced that that is goodness, and so we must agree that the end of all things is the good.” (3.p.11) Only God and the Void simply are, and the Muses clearly are not putting him in touch with the grammar of God. [Slide 10] Boethius has forgotten the proper syntax which God placed in the fabric of reality itself: “‘So tell me, do you remember what is the end and purpose of things and the goal to which the whole course of nature is directed?’ ‘I did hear it once,’ I said, ‘but my memory has been blunted by grief.’” (1.p7.19) This loss of syntax leads to all of us becoming unnecessarily confused as we forget where true happiness is located, not in an intransitive state but in active participation:

The whole concern of men, which is the effort of a multitude of pursuits keeps busy, moves by different roads, yet strives to arrive at one and the same end, that of happiness…These, then, are the things which people long to obtain. And they want riches, position, estates, glory and pleasures, because it is their conviction that through them they will achieve self-sufficiency, respect, power, celebrity and happiness. This is the good that men are looking for in such a variety of pursuits. And it is not difficult to show the hand of nature in this, since in spite of the variety and difference of their opinions, men are agreed in their choice of the good as their goal. (3.p2)

We make the direct object of our desires each of these things, but as stewards we should be the subject and stewardship the verb we exert over our worldly goods, which we can only do if we get our spiritual syntax right: “Each happy individual is therefore divine. While only God is so by nature, as many as you like may become so by participation.” (3.p10) We are all transitive, our syntax wants to participate in eternity. So here’s the homework: How do we improperly define our sense of meaning as an intransitive experience of momentary feelings, and so how do we fail as a result to understand the proper syntax of our thought life as directed to God? What basic units of meaning have we made our direct objects which set our sights lower than eternity? And in so doing how have we failed to submit ourselves to God as the real subject of the sentence of existence?

[Slide 11] Logic likewise has a proper use, and Boethius has failed to use it properly. Macrobius, whom Boethius had surely read, warned against using logic in a way that cuts apart nature. Lady Philosophy warns Boethius of the bad philosophers who assert logic chopping at the expense of Lady Philosophy’s ethos: “…the crowd of Epicureans and Stoics and the rest strove as far as they could… carrying me off protesting and struggling, as if I were part of the booty, tearing my dress, which I wove with my own hands, and then went off with their torn-off shreds, thinking they possessed all of me.” (1.3.143) But the real use of logic is to find wholeness. Lady Philosophy compares the proper use of logic to a bird: “I shall affix to your mind wings, whereby it may raise itself aloft, so that…you may return safely to your homeland, under my guidance, on my path, and in my carriage. For I have wings swiftly flying/Which can ascend the heights of heaven;/…I shall proceed by either path, confirming my propositions now from this side, now from that.” (4.1.86) There’s a soteriology in the syllogism when properly used not to claim to own Philosophy but to use the currents of the love of wisdom to explore the heights of truth. But because of this regard for the wholeness of the mind, that means the true philosopher cares about saving appearances, unlike the pseudo-philosophers who callously attack the dress of Philosophia: “Shall we, quoth she, frame our speech to the vulgar phrase, lest we seem to have as it were forsaken the use of human conversation?” (4.7.268) Our goal as logicians shouldn’t be to fancy up our words for its own sake, but to seek propositional clarity that helps us to edify the common sense voice. How do we use logic to chop up the intellect into death instead of building up the life of the mind? How do we fail to treat big ideas as personal and impersonally use them?

[Slide 12] This question of making grammar and logic personal of course leads directly to rhetoric, which is the art of audience-focused communication. Cassiodorus gives us a boilerplate definition: “Therefore the orator is, as has been said, ‘a good man skilled in speaking’ in civil cases. The task of the orator is to speak in such a way as to persuade; his goal is to persuade by his manner of speaking, insofar as the nature of the circumstances and the individuals involved in civil cases seems to allow.” (Cassiodorus 2.2.178) Lady Philosophy does not believe in the concept of Fortune, but as a good woman skilled in speaking, she knows that the individual she is talking to is in the circumstance of having a mind disturbed by the concept. And so she speaks to him about the concept on his own terms, as good rhetoricians do, saying: “So let us use the sweet persuasiveness of rhetoric, which can only be kept on the right path if it does not swerve from our precepts…” So appealing to the audience-awareness potential of rhetoric, Lady Philosophy then depicts Dame Fortune: “For this is my nature, this is my continual game: turning my wheel swiftly I delight to bring low what is on high, to raise high what is down. Go up, if you will, but on this condition, that you do not really think it a wrong to have to go down again whenever the course of my sport demands.” (2.1-2.177-183). The overwhelming persuasions of Fortune leave the listener with no agency, no chance to respond, as false gods do not respect the Imago Dei. False gods do not speak a listening word. In Book 5, Lady Philosophy then responds to Boethius’s concern that God’s foreknowledge makes our choices so impregnably predestined that we have nothing to say and that prayers are of no avail. But she reassures him that God in His sovereignty has made rhetoric possible by positioning Himself as an audience, He who needs no persuading giving us a hearing nonetheless: “This is an old complaint about Providence. Cicero attacked it vigorously in his treatise…Everything that is known is comprehended not according to its own nature, but according to the ability to know of those who do the knowing… Avoid vice, therefore, and cultivate virtue; lift up your mind to the right kind of hope, and put forth humble prayers on high.” (5.4.124-6.137) Because God knows us, we are able to be agents of persuasion. To what extent have we failed to relegate persuasion and let ourselves be compelled by the feeling of inevitability like Boethius before Fortune’s Wheel when we should be acting as stewards of our domains, empowered to be persuaded without being controlled? Knowing that God not only lets our prayers be heard but even permitted Satan himself to speak in his court in the Book of Job, how do we avoid speaking the deaf words of Fortune and give instead our speech the strong pliability that shows we know how to listen to as well as speak to our audience?

All of these lessons come from Lady Philosophy, whom I have drawn for you in my little sketch that you see here. [Slide 13] In the end, we are the objects of ethopoeia—as we learn the disciplines of the liberal arts and the potential for shaping personality imbued in them, we learn to identify with those personalities. We learn to define the sentence structure that can make our mental lives beautiful, to discover the sanctifying power of the syllogism in implementing our thoughts into truth, and experience and engage the powers of persuasion to promote the good. Boethius used the liberal arts to have a good death by writing a book that defied the injustice which broke over him. When we personify the liberal arts we turn around and find that they have awakened our personalities, and rooted them so deeply in the love of wisdom, that when the enemies of wisdom come, we will know what to say and how to give a reason for our belief that the liberal arts do encourage, empower, and exhort us to live the good life.