Hortulus Volume 2 2006

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The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studieswww.hortulus.net

Vol. 2, No. 2 January 2006ISSN #1552-9584

Table of Contents

Letter from the Editor 1

The Platonic-Aristotelian Hybridity of Aquinass AestheticTheoryAuthor: Daniel GallagherThomas Aquinass aesthetic theory stands as an example of intellectualhybridity in medieval scholasticism. Aquinas was neither a pureAristotelian nor a pure Platonist in his understanding of beauty. Nor did hesimply select certain truthful elements from Plato and Aristotle andreassemble them to suit his own purposes. Rather, recognizing a need tointegrate these two distinctive, though interrelated, theories of thebeautiful, Aquinas produced a kind of hybrid kalology that embraces boththe transcendental and aesthetic aspects of beauty.

Techniques for Preserving a Tradition: Incorporating Fortune and Faith in the ConsolatioPhilosophiae 16Author: Alexandra CookElements of pagan theism and Christian theology appear in this salvific treatise, but most Boethian scholars dismissthem as instances of unconscious syncretism. Yet Boethius deliberately effects an ideological synthesis byinternalizing and christianizing the Platonic dialogue. Boethiuss emphasis on the importance of the role of chance,as expressed through both Lady Philosophy and Lady Fortune, reminds us that uncertainty is the necessaryfoundation upon which faith is built. Faith itself permits what Derrida calls a venture into absolute risk, in whichultimate consolation can perhaps be found.

Reading the Future and Freeing the Will: Astrology of the Arabic World and Albertus MagnusAuthor: Scott Hendrix 30Scholars have become increasingly aware of the importance of a work defending astrology as the most Christianscience, known today as the Speculum Astronomiae. There have been a number of articles and books written on the

subject; most scholars, however, have concentrated on the authorship and dating of the text. This study turns awayfrom the traditional scholarly orientation to focus instead on the content of the Speculum, its sources, and its impacton the intellectual world of the medieval period.


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Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies Vol. 2, No. 1, 2006


Dear Readers,

In Italo Calvinos short story Henry Ford, the famous industrialist states that technology should be used to

simplify our lives so we have the time to enjoy nature.1

As I compose this letter and various emails from a

grassy hill in Central Park in the heart of New York City, I cant help but appreciate that sentiment. My

laptop has permitted a substantial office upgrade: instead of four walls, rows of elms and beeches provide a

graceful border, and I now have the best lighting system in the world. Birdsong and a cool breeze gentle thesuns heat as I organize the final stages of this issues publication.

My satisfaction with the locale is enhanced by the expediency of instant communication. The virtual

connectivity provided by the platform of cyberspace is the determining factor ofHortuluss existence.

Although few of our staff live in proximity to each other and our writers hail from diverse universities, we

can communicate and collaborate across the greatest, or the smallest, of distances. As Thomas L. Friedman

writes in his recent history of the twenty-first century, our intellectual capital can be disaggregated,

delivered, distributed, produced, and put back together again in a unique way that gives us a whole new

freedom in the way we do work.2 Outsourcing, homesourcing, or, in my case, parksourcing, is steadily

becoming the dominant trend in global data transactions. My executive summer suite bears witness to this

technological triumph.

Hortulus is rooted in this intersection of the convenience of electronic networking and new methods of

perceiving and processing information, both of which are especially beneficial to the realm of education. The

availability, speed, and openness of information on the Internet permit associations and interpretations of

data heretofore unheard of. We try to incorporate the qualities of convergence and connectivity into each

article by providing links to relevant web sites, as well as Respond buttons that allow you to provide

feedback and create your own interface with the authors and their work. Of course the Internet offers many

possibilities for expansion along these lines, and we look forward to utilizing more ground in cyberspaces

virtual garden with issue #3.

The Internet is an extraordinary synthesis of heterogeneous constructs, from its fledgling existence as the

government-sponsored ARPANet to its current efflorescence of millions of privately created pages of

information. Our first essay contest featuring the topic of hybridity hearkens to that theme. In the Current

Issue section you will find a selection of interesting articles on various blendings in philosophy, literature,

religion, and science. The Lighter Fare section lives up to its name with a trip to the medieval kitchen as well

as a collection of pieces on one of our favorite subjects, books.

So with the unique applications and forms of exchange made available by cyberspace, the question is not

whether it is worthwhile to go online, but from where would you like to go online? Hortulus can be enjoyed

anywhere you can bring your connection and computer (or PDA, cell phone, etc.), but of course I

recommend, like Calvinos character Henry Ford, taking your equipment outdoors. You might be surprised at

how pleasantly productive that can be; my afternoon has certainly been both. I wish you a constructive (and

relaxing) summer, and I hope this little garden becomes a part of yours.

Hayley Weiner

Editor in Chief

Notes1. See the collection of Italo Calvinos short stories,Numbers in the Dark, trans. Tim Parks (New York:Vintage, 1996), p. 238.

2. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat(New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005), p. 7.


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The Platonic-Aristotelian Hybridity of Aquinass Aesthetic Theory

by Daniel Gallagher

The philosophical and theological legacy of Thomas Aquinas has suffered somewhat from beingpresented as an overgeneralized caricature, a sort of baptized Aristotelianism. Undoubtedly,Aquinas was heavily influenced by the thought of Aristotle, and found in the works of theStagirite a philosophical method quite effective for treating theological questions. By no means,however, did Aquinas simply transpose in toto Aristotles system into a Christian context; theenormous opus he completed in his short life reveals a philosophical and theological visionspanning a wide range of ancient, classical, and medieval sources. Nor did Aquinas opt todevelop the thought of Aristotle strictly as an antidote to what he considered to be the errors ofPlatonism. To the contrary, Aquinas demonstrates at times a surprising amount of sympathy forPlatonic philosophy.

One of the ways in which Aquinas reflects both Platonic and Aristotelian thought is in his theoryof the transcendentals. Plato famously taught that earthly things are traceable to ideas whichtranscend the sensible realm. The ideas, or true beings (ontos on), lie behind all sensiblethings.1 The ideas in which sensible things participate reveal being to be a unity rather than aplurality, true rather than apparent, and good rather than evil.2 All sensible things, because theyparticipate in the being of the ideas, partake of these properties of unity, truth, and goodness, butonly in an imperfect way. For Plato, these transcendental properties are found primarily in theideas and only secondarily in sensible things.

Aristotle considerably alters the Platonic theory and teaches that, rather than transcending thesensible realm, the ideas actually exist in the sensible realm as the forms which make things to be

of a certain kind and render them intelligible. He discusses the one and the true in books 6 and 10of hisMetaphysics, and the good in book 1 of theNicomachean Ethics. For Aristotle, in contrastto Plato, the transcendentals are found primarily in things.

Plato and Aristotle agree that the one, the true, and the good are transcendentals. But there isconsiderable disagreement between them as to how and where these transcendental propertiesexist. Moreover, there is a difference in the respective ways in which they place beauty into thescheme of transcendental properties. Plato includes beauty among the transcendentals of unity,truth, and goodness in a somewhat indirect way. He argues in the Lysis and Timeaus thatwhatever is good (agathon) is also beautiful (kalon), and in theRepublic that everything thatexists participates in the good.3 Nowhere, however, does Aristotle discuss beauty as atranscendental property.

How does Aquinas draw from the respective Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in respect to thetranscendentals? Aquinas bases his general theory of the transcendentals on Aristotle. He clearlyholds that the ideas do not exist apart from the material, sensible world, but in the things of theworld as their intelligible forms. Transcendentals are those properties of things which are not


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really distinct from the being of things. In order for a property to be transcendental, it must becoextensive with being, but it must also add a conceptual aspect to being distinct in its own right.So, rather than adding a specific difference, a transcendental property designates an aspect of

being present anywhere and everywhere being is found, but unique in its relation to our cognitivefaculty. Umberto Eco explains that transcendental properties are a bit like differing visualangles from which being can be looked at.4 Jacques Maritain similarly described thetranscendentals as concepts which surpass all limits of kind or category and will not sufferthemselves to be confined in any class, because they absorb everything and are to be foundeverywhere.5

Thomas Aquinas discusses the transcendentals in numerous places throughout his oeuvre.6 Themost explicit list of transcendental properties is found in the opening passages of the De veritate.There, Aquinas lists being (ens), thing (res), unity (unum), otherness (aliquid), truth (verum), andgoodness (bonum) as transcendental properties.7 Beauty, orpulchrum, is conspicuously absent.Several Thomistic scholars, however, have argued that Aquinas, following Plato, includes beauty

among the transcendentals in an indirect way.8

Others argue that Aquinas took the Aristotelianroute and excluded beauty from among the transcendentals.9

I argue that Aquinas in fact developed a hybridity of Platonic and Aristotelian thought in regardto beauty. With Plato, Aquinas maintained that the primary instance of beauty (i.e., God)transcends the sensible, material world and alone possesses beauty in all its perfection. Sensiblethings participate in this beauty, but only in an imperfect way. At the same time, followingAristotle, Aquinas maintained that the forms of things, in which beauty exists, are immanent tothe sensible world rather than belonging to a separate realm. In what follows, I explore moredeeply the way in which Aquinas develops this hybridity by interrelating the sensible, oraesthetic, aspect of beauty to the transcendental aspect. We will see that he does so by means ofan intricate and involved line of reasoning that relates created, or finite, beauty, to uncreated, or

divine, beauty.First of all, allow me to clarify what I mean by hybridity as it pertains to Aquinass philosophyof beauty. If we understand hybridity as the blending of two different philosophical currents, itwould be hard to find points in Aquinass philosophy that are unequivocally hybrid. Aquinas wasless concerned with harmonizing different philosophical views than he was with searching forthe truth wherever it might be found. If, on the other hand, we understand hybridity to refer to aprogeny of thought displaying characteristics of both parents, we come close to discovering sucha hybridity in Aquinass philosophy of beauty. He was neither a pure Aristotelian nor a purePlatonist in his aesthetic theory. Nor did he simply select certain attractive elements from Platoand Aristotle and reassemble them to suit his own purposes. Rather, recognizing a need tointegrate the Platonic and Aristotelian theories of the beautiful, he produced a kind of hybridkalology embracing both the transcendental and aesthetic, or sensible, aspects of beauty.

In the next section, I set the stage for Aquinass hybridity by outlining the debate on beautysplace among the transcendentals at the time Aquinass own aesthetic ideas were coming to


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fruition. In Part II, I will examine some of the key ideas found in Aquinass commentary onDionysiussDe divinis nominibus that provide evidence for his hybrid theory.

I

Strictly speaking, there is no single Thomistic system of aesthetics. What Aquinas does have tosay about beauty is quite interesting and deliberate. What he says, and where he says it, dependsmore on immediate and, at least in his eyes, more pressing philosophical or theological issues. Acomprehensive survey of the relevant texts reveals that Aquinas was concerned with twooverarching themes: the natures of transcendental beauty and sensible beauty, respectively. Thedevelopment of the former owes much to various forms of Platonism and Neoplatonism,especially as they are further developed by Augustine and Dionysius. Aquinas adopts from Platothe standard transcendental properties of the one, the good, and the true. He relies on Augustinesmetaphysical basis for the interchangeability of these three transcendentals. Augustine arguedthat whatever is exists as a unity, that whatever is true is true insofar as it exists, and that insofaras a thing is, it is good.10 We will look more closely at the Dionysian influence on Aquinas inPart III.

At the same time, Aquinass teaching on sensible beauty is built upon Aristotles philosophy ofnature and epistemology. Aristotle speaks of the form as the perfecting principle of a thing. Thesubstantial form is what brings matter out of a state of potentiality to actuality. At the same time,the form is the primary cause of knowledge. When we know a thing, we know it in its actuality.We know the thing, so to speak, as existing in some state of perfection; not in the sense that it iswithout blemish, but rather in the sense that it has been brought out of a potential state so as toexist as this thing of a certain kind.11 Against this Aristotelian background, Aquinas theorizesthat, in order for a thing to be beautiful, it must be fully realized in its particular form, and toknow beauty is to have apprehended the form. According to Aquinas, beauty properly belongs

to the nature of a formal cause.12

Aquinas, as I have noted, did not compose any single particular treatise on the beautiful. This isa consequence, writes Jacques Maritain, of the stern discipline of teaching to which thephilosophers of the Middle Ages were subjected. They were absorbed in sifting and exploring inevery direction the problems of the School and indifferent about leaving unexploited areasbetween the deep quarries they excavated.13 The lack of a single coherent treatise on beauty byAquinas forces us to pull together his thoughts and organize them in some systematic fashion. Todo so, we must first address a preliminary methodological question: which is primary,transcendental beauty or sensible beauty? Although Aquinas never used the term transcendentalbeauty, it is commonly accepted by contemporary Thomistic scholars to designate the beautypossessed by every existing thing insofar as it exists.14 Unlike aesthetic beauty, it is not

necessarily dependent on sensory and intellectual knowledge. Aesthetic beauty, on the otherhand, is the perceivable beauty of things in which, once having been apprehended through thesenses, the intellect takes delight and finds rest. In light of Aquinass epistemologyanepistemology heavily influenced by Aristotle and best summed up in the phrase nothing existsin the intellect without first having been apprehended by the senses (in intellectu autem nihil


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est, nisi prius fuerit in sensu)it would seem that sensible beauty has to be our starting point.15If our knowledge of the beautiful is possible only through the empirical experience of beautifulsensible things, then it would seem preferable to begin with a treatment of the sensible

characteristics of beauty.A chronological study of Aquinass works, however, reveals that one of his earliest interests wassupersensible beauty. The fact that our knowledge of beauty begins in sense experience does notnecessarily mean that sensible beauty must always be the primary analogate in respect totranscendent beauty.16 God, insofar as He embodies all perfections in an exceedinglytranscendent way, is ultimately the primary subject of the predication of any perfection.17 Beautyis one such perfection. So even though Aquinas does not provide an explicit methodologicaltreatment of the analogous predication of beauty across the transcendent and sensible realms, wemust be careful lest we deduce, from a lack of textual evidence, that Aquinas was not interestedin the question of how beauty could be predicated analogously to both the supersensible andsensible realms. The issue, in fact, had already been a point of extensive discussion in high

scholasticism.18

As I shall show in Part II, this issue had a direct impact on the debate overbeauty as a transcendental property.

Aquinas himself seems to move back and forth between the supersensible and sensible notions ofbeauty with relative ease. For example, his famous statement of the three essential characteristicsof aesthetic beautyintegrity, proportion, and clarityappears in his reply to an objection thatpertains as much to the supersensible order as to the sensible order. The question posed in thePrima Pars of the Summa Theologiae is whether the sacred doctors have correctly designatedessential attributes to the persons of the Trinity.19 The context for this question was the commonancient Christian practice of applying certain characteristics specifically to one particular personof the Trinity rather than another. Aquinas argued that those theologians who had assignedbeauty primarily to the second person of the Trinity did so with good reason.20 Granted, the

second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, is the only incarnate and visible person of the three.Thus, if Aquinas wanted to emphasize the sensible qualities of beauty, naturally he, and thesacred doctors who preceded him, would assign them to the Son rather than to the Father or tothe Holy Spirit. However, as is clear from his emphasis in the article on the completeidentification of the Fathers perfection with the Sons, the beauty of which he speaks is notsimply the visible beauty of the Son as seen in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. It alsorefers to the beauty of the second person of the Trinity as existing from all eternity before havingtaken flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and as having ascended back to the Father inheaven. Thus, the context in which we find this passage describing the essential aestheticcharacteristics of the beautiful applies to both the sensible and the supersensible realms.

In sum, Aquinas does not hesitate to apply aesthetic qualities, whose primary subjects ofpredication are sensible realities, analogously to the transcendent beauty of the second person ofthe Trinity. That is to say that the three essential qualities of aesthetic beauty are made to bearupon our understanding of transcendent beauty as it exists in the second person of the Trinity. Inconclusion, supersensible beauty is primary in the sense that beauty exists most perfectly and


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fully in God, but sensible beauty is primary in the sense that our initial knowledge of thebeautiful comes through the perception of the essential aesthetic characteristics of integrity,proportion, and clarity.

IIAquinas was introduced to the Platonic notion of transcendental beauty early in his philosophicaltraining. Between 1248 and 1252, while under the tutelage of Albert the Great in Cologne,Aquinas had the occasion to attend Alberts lectures on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagites Dedivinis nominibus. This work, by an anonymous Syrian monk of the sixth century C.E., wascanonical for the education of any medieval cleric.21Clerical veneration of this difficult andhighly Platonic work was due first and foremost to the alleged connection between its author andthe apostle Paul. The Dionysius who wrote the treatise was thought to be the same Dionysiuswho had heard Paul preach at the Areopagus in Athens. One of Aquinass earliest extantmonographs is a summary of Alberts lectures on divine names, titled Quaestiones in librum Dedivinis nominibus Dionysii.

Apparently, Aquinass interest in the thought of Dionysius was not simply a stop on his journeytoward a full-blown Aristotelianism. Aquinas himself wrote a commentary onDe divinisnominibus that dates to no earlier than 1268, twenty years after he had heard Albert lecture onDionysiuss work in Cologne. Several Thomistic scholars have viewed Aquinass commentary aslittle more than a collection of cursory remarks on a text every doctor in the church was expectedto comment upon during his career.22 Consequently, Aquinass commentary is often judged to beof little value in the attempt to ascertain his original thoughts on beauty. A closer reading,however, indicates that Aquinas took the Platonic ideas of Dionysius seriously. To take but oneexample, the procedure of the Summa Theologiae displays an enormous amount of respect forthe merits of Dionysiuss via negativa methodology.23 In the opening questions of the Summa,

Aquinas first addresses what God is not before going on to explain what God is. In hisintroduction to question 3 of the Prima Pars of the Summa, Aquinas writes: Now that we haveexamined whether God exists, it remains for us to examine in what way God exists. But since, inthe case of God, we cannot know whether something is, but rather whether it is not, we must firstconsider in what way God is not before considering in what way God is.24

Aquinas displays an equal amount of respect for Dionysiuss teaching on the interconvertibilityof the good and the beautiful as he does for Dionysiuss teaching on the via negativa. In hiscommentary on DionysiussDe divinis nominibus (In librum beati Dionysii De divinis nominibusexpositio), Aquinas writes: Dionysius says that because the beautiful is the cause of things in somany ways, it follows that the good and the beautiful are the same thing, because all thingsdesire the beautiful and the good as cause for all things; and therefore there is nothing which

does not participate in the beautiful and the good, since each thing is beautiful and goodaccording to its own form; and furthermore, we can also dare to say that even prime matterparticipates in the beautiful and the good.25 This passage is one of the strongest pieces ofevidence that Thomas included the beautiful among the transcendentals because the good andthe beautiful are the same thing.


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By including beauty among the transcendental properties of existence, Aquinas places himselfthough not squarelywithin the Platonic tradition. Platos dialogues had unambiguouslymanifested an affinity toward beauty as a transcendental.26Both in theLysis and in the Timaeus,

Socrates states that whatever is good is beautiful, and whatever beautiful, good. The Timaeusfurther connects this idea with creation; everything that is made is both good and beautiful.Aristotle, in contrast, does not include beauty among the transcendentals. In the Metaphysics, hementions only truth, goodness, and unity.27

In the early years of Christianity, Plato clearly exerted a greater influence than Aristotle.Plotinus,28Augustine, and Dionysius all add beauty to Aristotles list of transcendental properties.Augustine states the case unambiguously in his City of God, a work with which Aquinas wouldhave been quite familiar:29 the very order, changes, and movements in the universe, the verybeauty of form in all that is visible, proclaim, however silently, both that the world was createdand also that its Creator could be none other than God whose greatness and beauty are bothineffable and invisible.30 Goodness is the door, so to speak, through which beauty enters the hall

of the transcendentals.Dionysius, like Augustine, also treats beauty as a transcendental property. His fidelity to thePlatonic approach is quite evident throughoutDe divinis nominibus.31 The interchangeability ofbeauty and goodness, perceived in created things, gives all the greater testimony to the presenceand indistinguishability of beauty and goodness in the divine. Dionysius writes, The Beautiful istherefore the same as the Good, for everything looks to the Beautiful and the Good as the causeof being, and there is nothing in the world without a share of the Beautiful and theGoodThisthe One, the Good, the Beautifulis in its uniqueness the Cause of the multitudesof the good and the beautiful.32

Throughout the Middle Ages, the debate over beauty as a transcendental property continued to

gain momentum. On one side, there were those who could not bring themselves to believe thatbeauty is to be found in every existing thing. For them, the meaning of goodness (kalon) in thePlatonic sense could refer analogously to the beauty of moral action or to the disposition of thesoul, but not to all things as they appear to the human senses.33 To say that good moral action isbeautiful is quite acceptable, but to say that every existent thing is beautiful insofar as itexists is contrary to common experience. Moreover, to say such a thing would offend the beautyof God by drawing parallels between God and even the ugliest of existing things. On the otherside of the debate were those who staunchly maintained the transcendental nature of beauty.Bonaventure is most notable in this regard.34 For these thinkers, beauty is present wherever beingis present, and things are beautiful insofar as they exist.

By the early thirteenth century, there was a move toward a compromise. This position is best

expressed in the Summa fratris Alexandri of Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle. In thiswork we find an official list of transcendentals that includes only unity, truth, and goodness.35However, the text goes on to assert that, even though goodness and beauty are identical inreality, they differ from each other conceptually (secundum rationem). The latter part of thiscompromise shows an attempt to perpetuate the Platonic position. The former part of the


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compromise, however, constitutes a clear concession to the growing Aristotelianism of the age.The compromise position, stemming from Bonaventure and his fellow Franciscans, asserted boththe transcendental aspects of beauty insofar as it held that goodness and beauty are identical in

things, but also maintained the aesthetic characteristic of beauty insofar as it held that, sincebeauty is a perceived goodness, there is a conceptual distinction between goodness and beauty.

Aquinas adhered to this compromise position.36 He certainly was caught up in the rising tide ofAristotelianism, and in theDe Veritate he clearly follows the Aristotelian designation of threetranscendentals: the one, the true, and the good.37 However, he also argues for a conceptualdistinction between goodness and beauty rather than a real distinction. In other words, Aquinasalso lets beauty enter the transcendental hall through the back door. In order to understand whyhe leaves the back door open, it will be necessary to take a closer look at his underlying Platonicviews as they emerge in his commentary on Dionysiuss De divinis nominibus.

III

As mentioned, most scholars read AquinassIn Dionysii De divinis nominibus as no more thanan extended expository gloss on Dionysiuss original work. Mark D. Jordan, for example,proposes that Aquinas, in commenting on Dionysiuss work, did not construct a treatment of thebeautiful according to his own notions or pedagogy. The existing remarks on beauty ought thento be read as just what they are, namely, asides in discussions directed to other ends. 38 Althoughit seems that Aquinas did not set out to construct a comprehensive treatment of the beautiful, Iargue that his remarks on beauty should be read as more than mere asides. Rather, I believethey have some bearing on Aquinass broader thought regarding both the transcendental andaesthetic properties of the beautiful.39 In chapter 4 ofDe divinis nominibus, Dionysius notes thattheologians have celebrated the good as beautiful.40 In later Scholastic philosophy, the concept ofbeauty would eventually include more sensible, aesthetic dimensions.41 Dionysius employs the

term in ways equally transcendental and aesthetic. The beautiful, insofar as it is a divine name, isas thoroughly transcendental as the good, light, love, and any other predicates that denote,however imperfectly, the perfections of God.42 Supersensible beauty, enjoyed by God alone,imparts sensible beauty to all creatures.

In his commentary on chapter 4, however, we see that Aquinas, while privileging thetranscendental dimensions, in no way undermines the aesthetic aspects of beauty. He does nothesitate to join Dionysius in moving from the transcendental to the sensible as a direction for hisown thinking.43 Aquinas understands Dionysius to be attempting two things in his exposition ofthe beautiful. First, he establishes beauty as a proper attribute of God.44 Second, he demonstratesin what way beauty is attributable to God. Dionysius does not proceed deductively from one tothe other, but rather allows his explanations of the possibility of predication and the mode of

predication to play off one another reciprocally throughout chapter 4. Aquinas comments that thepredication of beauty to God occurs in two possible ways: first, beauty is predicated of Godinsofar as God is the cause of all beauty; and second, that beauty is had by God without referenceto anything else (gratiose).45 Dionysius teases out the distinction between divine beauty andcreated beauty through a method of comparison and contrast, which he bases on the more


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elementary distinctions between the one and the many and participation and the participants.Aquinas notes that Dionysius makes these distinctions for three reasons: to show that beauty isattributed differently to God and to creatures; to show how beauty is attributed to creatures; and

to show how beauty is attributed to God.Aquinas believes that Dionysius implies a distinction in regard to how beauty is predicated toGod, and he himself supports that distinction by employing the notion of causality.46 BecauseGods beauty transcends even being itself, Dionysius calls God the all-beautiful (pagkalon) andsuperbeautiful (hyperkalon). Aquinas uses the wordpulcherrimus to refer to the former, andsuperpulcherto refer to the latter. The notion of causality is the key to understanding the basisfor the distinction. According to Aquinas,pulcherrimus refers to Gods perfect beauty asdistinguished from the imperfect beauty of created things. Unlike the beauty of creatures, Godsbeauty does not fade away, is not subject to variation, is not distinguished by degrees, nor is itdependent on the beholder.47 It is neither recognized nor described in terms of a lack or defect.Superpulcher, on the other hand, refers to the beauty of God in the order ofcausality. Because

Gods beauty is above all being, it tends toward diffusing itself outwardly. God possesseswithin Himself the font of all beauty. All beauty (omnis pulchritude) and each beautiful thing(omne pulchrum) preexist in God, not by way of distinction (divisim), but uniformly(uniformiter).

God is beyond beautiful in the words of Dionysius, or superbeautiful in the words ofAquinas, not only in a way that makes it unnecessary for Him to create in order to enhance Hisbeauty, but more importantly because His beauty makes him tend toward the act of creationinsofar as the multiplicity of the effects of Gods beauty preexist in him superabundantly asfirst cause (multiplices effectus in causa praeexistunt).48 AquinassIn Dionysii De divinisnominibus pays more than lip service to Dionysiuss Platonism. Aquinas has no one to thankmore for his doctrine concerning the interconvertibility of goodness and beauty than Dionysius,

who had argued that the good and the beautiful are the same in reality, though different inconcept.49 Although the good and the beautiful, insofar as they constitute transcendental aspectsof being, are, according to Aquinas, the same thing, they are often distinguished from oneanother on account of the ratio by which they are known.50 The good and the beautiful areconceptually distinct, but not distinct in reality.51 The good, because it is primarily known to theknower as desirable,52 and consequently pursued by him as an object to be possessed, belongsprimarily to the order of final causality.53 The beautiful, on the other hand, is pleasing simply inhaving been seen. The knower does not seek to possess it as a further end. Unlike the good,which pertains primarily to the appetitive power, the beautiful pertains primarily to the knowingpower (vis cognoscitiva).54 And since knowledge, insofar as it comes about through anassimilation of like with like, regards the form of a thing, it follows that beauty belongs primarily

to the order of formal causality.A philosophical hybridity emerges from the foregoing analysis of AquinassIn Dionysii Dedivinis nominibus. In this work, Aquinas manifests sympathy for the Platonically inspired notionof beauty as a transcendental property. Beauty, insofar as it may be predicated of any existing


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thing, surpasses the sensible realm and is common to created and divine realities. At the sametime, Aquinas adheres to the Aristotelian notion of knowledge through the senses. We find athing beautiful because, once perceived by the senses and known by the intellect, the thing is not

pursued for any ulterior motive or sought for any further possession. We can speak of beauty as atranscendental property common to all existing things, and we can speak of beauty as thepresence of proportion, order, and luminosity in things that please us when seen. Because theyare analogically related, we may speak of the former (i.e., transcendental beauty) in terms of thelatter (i.e., aesthetic beauty), and vice versa. In short, Aquinass understanding of beauty as hedescribes it in theIn Dionysii De divinis nominibus allows him to go back and forth betweentranscendental and aesthetic beauty as he does in question 39 of the Prima Pars SummaeTheologiae.

IV

In sum, Aquinass commentary on DionysiussDe divinis nominibus shows that he had a strongbent toward Platonic ideas relatively late in his career. He was doing more than fulfilling hisobligation to complete his commentary on a canonical work of the High Middle Ages. He wasclarifying some the key Neoplatonic ideas as they appeared in Dionysiuss thought, whilesimultaneously looking at the text through an Aristotelian lens. Beauty belongs to a thingprimarily in the order of form. It is more than just an excitation of the senses. It is a conformityof the thing to the mind. This proportion of beauty to the mind, effected through the perceptionof the form, enters into Aquinass philosophy through the influence of Aristotle. By the timeAquinas comments on Dionysiuss work, his thought on the relationship of form to matter, andof form to intellect, has already matured. It is through the abstraction of the form that the mindcomes to know things, and abstraction is possible because of the similarity, or proportion,between the mind and the form. So it is in the case of knowledge of the beautiful. The sensefaculty, which is a kind of knowledge, finds pleasure in the beautiful because of the similarity, orproportion, between the beautiful and the senses.

Thus, the key to the hybridity of Aquinass aesthetics is his understanding of form. Rather than asupersensible idea, the form becomes the individuating principle of an existing thing throughwhich the thing has existence, and by means of which that thing is known by the human intellectas beautiful. Even as Aquinas embraces these Aristotelian notions of nature and knowledge, hedoes not discard the Platonic notion of transcendental beauty. God is superbeautiful(superpulcher), and things, insofar as their existence participates in the existence of God, arebeautiful in a thoroughly transcendental way. Aquinas concurs with the traditional Aristoteliantranscendentals of unity, goodness, and truth, while at the same time allowing beauty to join thelist, primarily because of its interconvertibility with goodnessa Platonically inspired notion.

The end result is a unique aesthetic theory, thoroughly hybrid in its genesis, that clearly reflectsboth the transcendental as well as the sensible dimensions of beauty.


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Daniel Gallagher completed his M.A. in philosophy at the Catholic University of America. He iscurrently teaching and conducting doctoral research at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit,Michigan. His primary interests lie in Thomistic and medieval aesthetics.

Notes

The author expresses his deep gratitude to Prof. Christopher Begg, without whose support and guidancethis study would never have come to completion.

1. See Plato, Phaedo 102b-c 3-5; and idem,Republic 596a 6-7. All references to Platos works correspondto the marginalia indices as found in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton andHuntington Cairns, trans. Lane Cooper et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).

2. Plato, Phaedo 131-133, 135-136; and idem,Republic 5.479-480, 7.518, 9.582b-c.

3. Plato,Lysis 216; idem, Timaeus 30-34; and idem,Republic 6.507, 7.540.

4. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1988), p. 21.

5. Jacques Maritain,Art and Scholasticism, trans. J. F. Scanlan (New York: Scribner, 1930), p. 30.

6. See Thomas Aquinas,De Veritate c. 1 a. 1, cap 21 a. 1-3; idem,De natura generis c. 2; idem,Depotential q. 9 a. 7; and idem,In 1 Sententia c. 8 q. 1 a. 3. All references to Aquinass works in Latincorrespond to theBiblioteca de Autores Christianos editions of his work (Salamanca: B. A. C., 1951). AllEnglish translations are my own.

7. Aquinas,De veritate ques. 1 art. 1.

8. See for example Josef Jungmann,Aesthetik(Freiburg: Breisgau, 1884); Francis Kovach, Philosophy ofBeauty (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974); Etienne Gilson, The Forgotten Transcendental:Pulchrum, inElements of Christian Philosophy (New York: Greenwood, 1960), pp. 159-63; andMaritain,Art and Scholasticism, trans. Scanlan. Umberto Eco includes beauty among the transcendentals,but only implicitly; see Eco,Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Bredin.

9. See for example Jan A. Aertsen,Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of ThomasAquinas (New York: Brill, 1996); Edgar de Bruyne,Lesthtique du Moyen Age (Louvain: ditions delInstitut suprieur de philosophie, 1947); and Maurice de Wulf,Art et Beaut(Louvain: Institutsuprieur, 1943).

10. Augustine of Hippo,De moribus Manichaeorum 2.6: Nihil autem est esse quam unum esse; idem,Soliloquia 2.5: Verum mihi videtur esse id quod est; and idem,De vera religione 11.21: Inquantumest, quidquid est, bonum est. All references to Augustines work correspond to the Patrologia Latina

(PL) series, ed. Jacques Paul Migne, vols. 34-47. All English translations are my own.

11. See Walter Brogan,Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being (New York: SUNY Press,2005), pp. 32-36, 41-42.

12. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (hereafter cited as ST) 1 q. 12 a. 1: Et quia cognitio fit per


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assimilationem, similitudo autem respicit formam, pulchrum proprie pertinet ad rationem causaeformalis. [And since knowledge comes about through assimilation, but likeness through form, thebeautiful properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause.]

13. Jacques Maritain,Art and Scholasticism, trans. Scanlan, p. 1.14. Umberto Eco,Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (London: Yale University Press,1986), pp. 14-19.

15. Iohannes Amos Commenius, Orbis Pictus: Nothing is in the intellect which will not first have beenin the sense faculty. See ST1 q. 55 a. 2 ad 2, 2-2ae q. 173 a. 2.

16. By primary analogate, I mean the side of the analogy that is more easily grasped in respect to theother. In the analogy a point is to a line as a surface is to a solid, the latter side of the analogy is primaryinsofar as we have sensible knowledge of solids, whereas points and lines are geometrically abstractconcepts.

17. See especially ST1 q. 13 a. 6, in which Aquinas argues that all that can be attributed to God is saidabout Himper prius in respect to creatures. We can turn to Aquinass teaching on beatitudo as but oneexample of how God stands as the primary subject of predication for qualities shared by God and humanbeings; see ST1-2ae q. 3 a. 2 ad 4: cum beatitudo dicat quandam ultimam perfectionem, secundumquod diversae res beatitudinis capaces ad diversos gradus perfectionis pertingere possunt. Secundum hocnecesse est quod diversimode beatitudo dicatur. Nam in Deo est beatitudo per essentiam: quia ipsum esseeius est operatio eius, qua non fruitur alio, sed seipso. Because there is no real distinction between Godsblessedness and existence, the quality of blessedness applies most perfectly to God. Aquinas goes on toexplain how other beings capable of blessedness can only achieve it through operatio. All of the qualitiesthat apply to God, insofar as they are possessed by Godper essentiam, are predicated of him in a waysimilar to beatitudo.

18. See Jan A. Aertsen,Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas(New York: Brill, 1996), pp. 335-41.

19. ST1 q. 39 a. 8.

20. ST1 q. 39 a. 8: Species autem, sive pulchritudo, habet similitudinem cum propriis filii. Nam adpulchritudinem tria requiruntur. Primo quidem, integritas sive perfectio, quae enim diminuta sunt, hocipso turpia sunt. Et debita proportio sive consonantia. Et iterum claritas, unde quae habent coloremnitidum, pulchra esse dicuntur. Quantum igitur ad primum, similitudinem habet cum proprio filii,inquantum est filius habens in se vere et perfecte naturam patris. Unde, ad hoc innuendum, Augustinus insua expositione dicit, ubi, scilicet in filio, summa et prima vita est, et cetera. Quantum vero ad secundum,convenit cum proprio filii, inquantum est imago expressa patris. Unde videmus quod aliqua imago dicituresse pulchra, si perfecte repraesentat rem, quamvis turpem. Et hoc tetigit Augustinus cum dicit, ubi esttanta convenientia, et prima aequalitas, et cetera. Quantum vero ad tertium, convenit cum proprio filii,inquantum est verbum, quod quidem lux est, et splendor intellectus, ut Damascenus dicit.

21. Gilson, Forgotten Transcendental, pp. 159-63.

22. See for example Mark D. Jordan, The Evidence of the Transcendentals and the Place of Beauty inThomas Aquinas,International Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1989), 393-407; Umberto Eco,Art andBeauty, trans. Bredin, pp. 13-18; and Maritain,Art and Scholasticism, trans. Scanlan, pp. 1-3.


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23. See ST1 questions 1-4.

24. ST1 q. 3: Cognito de aliquo an sit, inquirendum restat quomodo sit, ut sciatur de eo quid sit. Sed quia

de Deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quid non sit, non possumus considerare de Deo quomodo sit, sedpotius quomodo non sit.

25. Thomas Aquinas,In librum beati Dionysii De divinis nominibus exposition 4.8:et [Dionysius] dicitquod, quia tot modis pulchrum est causa omnium, inde est quod bonum et pulchrum sunt idem, quiaomnia desiderant pulchrum et bonum, sicut causam omnibus modis; et quia nihil est quod non participetpulchro et bono, cum unumquodque sit pulchrum et bonum secundum propriam formam; et ulterius,etiam, audaciter hoc dicere poterimus quod non-existens, id est materia prima,participat pulchro et bono.Note that the italicized words in the Latin text are Aquinass citations from DionysiussDe divinisnominibus.

26. Plato,Lysis 216d; idem, Timaeus 87c, 53b.

27. Aristotle,Metaphysics 1003b 22-23; 1054a 13-19. All citations of Aristotle correspond to themarginalia indices in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random, 1941).

28.Enneads 5.8.9, 6.6.18, 6.7.31-32. All references to PlotinussEnneads correspond to the marginaliaindices ofPlotinos: Complete Works, ed. Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie (Grantwood, N.J.: ComparativeLiterature Press, 1918).

29. Aquinas draws heavily upon The City of Godas a primary source for the composition of his SummaTheologiae. See especially Questions 24-29 of the Prima Secundae in the Summa Theologiae.

30. Augustine of Hippo, City of God11.4.2:mundus ipse ordinatissima sua mutabilitate et mobilitate etuisibilium omnium pulcherrima specie quodam modo tacitus et factum se esse et non nisi a Deoineffabiliter atque inuisibiliter magno et ineffabiliter atque inuisibiliter pulchro fieri se potuisse proclamat.

31. Pseudo-Dionysius,De divinis nominibus 4.10, 7. All citations of the Pseudo-Dionysius correspond tomarginalia indices ofThe Divine Names and Mystical Theology, trans. John D. Jones (Milwaukee:Marquette University Press, 1980).

32. Pseudo-Dionysius,De divinis nominibus 4.6.

33. In the Symposium 212a, as Socrates retells his famous conversation with Diotima, he says that it isonly when he discerns beauty itself through what makes it visible that a man will be quickened with thetrue, and not the seeming, virtuefor it is virtues self that quickens him, not virtues semblance. SeeCollected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Hamilton and Cairns, trans. Cooper et al., p. 563. Elsewhere Socrateslays down the premise that not just some, but many things, appear ugly to the senses. Cf. Plato, GreaterHippias 286a ff.

34. Cf. Bonaventure,In sententiis 2 34.2.6; and idem,Itinerarium Mentis in Deum 2.10.35. Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle, Summa Fratris Alexandri 1.1.2.

36. Aquinas,In Dionysii De divinis nominibus 4.5; ST1 q. 5 a. 4 ad 1, 1-2ae q. 27 a. 1 ad 3.


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37. Thomas Aquinas,De veritate 1.1.

38. Jordan, Evidence of the Transcendentals, p. 395. Cf. Armaund Mauer,About Beauty: A ThomisticInterpretation (Houston: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1983), pp. 8-13.

39. For similar arguments, see Lawrence Dewan, St. Thomas and the Divine Names, Science et Esprit32 (1980), 19-33; Luis Clavell, La Belleza en el comentario tomista alDe divinis nominibus, Anuariofilosfico 17 (1984), 93-99.

40. Cf. Maritain,Art and Scholasticism, trans. Scanlan, pp. 30-32.

41. ST1 q. 5 a. 4 ad 1; 2-2ae q. 27 a. 1 ad 3. See Eco,Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Bredin, pp. 1-19.

42. Pseudo-Dionysius,De divinis nominibus 1.6/596B, 2.1/637B, 2.7/645A.

43.It is more common for authors to move from sensible beauty to supersensible beauty. This is themethod adopted by Armand Mauer, for example, inAbout Beauty: A Thomistic Interpretation (Houston:Center for Thomistic Studies, 1983). Raymond Spiazzi, Toward a Theology of Beauty, The Thomist17(1954), 351, also represents this approach when he writes of the metaphysician that from beings heascends to being, and returns to the formerHe can, then, start from beauty and return to beauty; andreturn in a circular movement from one form of knowledge and enjoyment to another.

44. In this regard, sacred scripture suffices for Aquinas in establishing the predication of beauty to God.Aquinas,In Dionysii De divinis nominibus 4.5, refers to passages from the Canticle of Canticles, Psalm95, and the First Letter of John.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.: Deus semper est pulcher secundum idem et eodem modo et sic excluditur alteratiopulchritudinisnon est in eo generatio aut corruptio pulchritudinis, neque iterum augmentum veldiminutio eius, sicut in rebus corporalibus apparet. [God is always beautiful in one and the same wayand thus any alteration of beauty is excluded from himthere is in him no generation or corruption ofbeauty, neither is there any increase or decrease in his beauty, as there appears to be in corporeal things.]

48. Ibid.

49. Rosa Padellaro de Angelis,Linfluenza de Dionigi lAreopagita sul pensiero medioevale (Rome:ELIA, 1975). For a bibliography of Dionysiuss influence on Aquinas and on mediaeval philosophy ingeneral, see Kevin F. Doherty, S.J., Toward a Bibliography of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite: 1900-1955, The Modern Schoolman 33 (1956), 257-68; and idem, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite: 1955-1960, The Modern Schoolman 40 (1962/63), 55-9.

50. Aquinas,In Dionysii De divinis nominibus c. 4 lect. 22. Cf. ST1.5.4 ad 1, 1-2ae 27.1 ad 3, 2-2ae145.2 ad 1.

51. Joseph Owens,An Elementary Christian Metaphysics (Houston: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1985),pp. 122-24.


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52. ST1 q. 5 a. 1c ad 1, 1 q. 5 art. 3c ad 1, 1 q. 5 a. 5, 1 q. 6 a. 1c, 1 q. 6 a. 2 ad 2, 1 q. 16 a. 3.4c, 1 q. 19a. 9c, 1 q. 48 a. 1c, 1-2ae q. 22 a. 1c. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles 3.24 n. 6; idem,DeMalo q. 1 a. 1 sed contra; idem, Sententia Metaphysicae 12.l.7 n. 4. See also Fran ORourke, Pseudo-

Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas (New York: Brill, 1992), pp. 85-89.53. ST1 q. 5 a. 4, 1 q. 65 a 2, 1 q. 82 a. 4, 1-2ae q. 1 a. 4, 2-2ae q. 23 a. 7, 2-2ae q. 141 a. 6; ThomasAquinas, Scriptum super Sententiis 2 d. 1 q. 2 a. 2 s.c. 2, 2 d. 15 q. 3 a. 3 s.c. 1, 3 d. 27 q. 2 a. 4 q. 3;idem, Summa Contra Gentiles 3 c. 20 n. 1, 3 c. 109 n. 6; and idem,De Veritate q. 3 a. 3 ad 9, q. 21 a. 6arg. 1.

54. ST1 q. 5 a. 4 ad 1, 1-2ae q. 27 a. 1 ad 3.


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Techniques for Preserving a Tradition: Incorporating Fortune and Faith in

the Consolatio Philosophiae

by Alexandra Cook

While nearly every text credited to Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius bears the mark of hisintention to transmit Greek philosophy to the West and to preserve the classical tradition, it is inthe Consolatio Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), his final work, that the value ofthat pagan legacy is most urgently at stake.1 The Consolation is Boethiuss last piece, writtenwhile he was in exile for purported treason against Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths.2 Boethiuswas executed shortly afterward. The tragic context of the texts production gives a particularpoignancy to its consolatory efforts and a particular weight to the source from which the narratorseeks comfort. In the Consolation, the pagan legacy that Boethius worked so hard to preserve iscalled upon to perform the momentous feat of reconciling the narrator to the loss of all theearthly goods that made life pleasurable, and indeed to the possibility of the loss of life itself.

Yet because Boethius was also a Christianindeed, he was the author of several Christiantheological tractatesboth ancient and modern scholars have puzzled over why the author, atthis crisis in his life, sought comfort primarily from Neoplatonic philosophical ideas rather thanChristian theological ones.3 What, Boethian scholars ask, does this choice tell us aboutBoethiuss attitude toward Christianity? During the period in which Boethius wrote, manyproponents of Neoplatonic philosophic were outspokenly critical of Christianity.4 Christianthinkers responded in kind, and both groups criticized aspects of pagan theism. Yet in contrast tomany of his scholarly peers, Boethius took special care to create a philosophical treatise that,insofar as it is possible, offers an integration of philosophy and a few select elements of popular

pagan theology that rarely contradicts the tenets of Christian doctrine. Ironically, becauseBoethius was careful to avoid religious conflict, his true views via the relationship betweenChristianity, Greek philosophy, and pagan theology have become the subject of one of the mostheated controversies in modern Boethian studies.

The figures of Lady Philosophy and Lady Fortune have often been called into service to settle orat least to further the debate about Boethiuss ideological loyalties, for they seem to function assome of the most visible evidence of Boethiuss devotion to, respectively, Neoplatonicphilosophy and a species of pagan theism. For example, Pierre Courcelle declares, Que Bocesoit Chrtien ou non, toute allusion lcriture ou aux thologiens aurait t, aprs quil etchoisi ce personnage fictif de Philosophie, une faute de logic et de gout. [Whether or notBoethius was a Christian, all allusion (in the Consolation) to the Scriptures or to the theologians

would be, after he had chosen the fictive personage of Lady Philosophy, a fault of logic and oftaste.] Courcelle subsequently classifies Lady Philosophys use of both pagan and Christiantheological terms as lapses in Boethiuss purported efforts to write an exclusivelyphilosophical treatise and to retain clear and inviolable distinctions between the realms of reasonand faith.5 Edmund Reiss makes a similar argument about Philosophy, noting that the physical


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details of Lady Philosophys description make up a symbolic iconography which ultimatelyreveals their essentially traditional nature, harking back to conventions inaugurated in PlatosPhaedrus and continued in his Crito; for Reiss, as for Courcelle, Lady Philosophy is strictly a

philosophical figure.

6

On the other hand, C. J. de Vogel registers her surprise that, despiteBoethiuss well-documented love of Platonic philosophy, the Consolations narrator professessuch heartfelt belief in the figure of Lady Fortune: Fortune is an analogue to the pagan goddessFortuna, a figure embraced by proponents of popular pagan theism but scorned by the elevatedelite of philosophy, and whose appearance is therefore puzzling in the work of such an eruditescholar. De Vogel concludes that the presence of this figure can be classed as an unconsciousbit of syncretism, a spontaneously voiced pagan belief.7 As these examples show, modernscholars tend to read the Ladies Philosophy and Fortune as representatives of two very differentand opposing ideological systems, nor do they believe that Boethius blurred the boundariesbetween these religious and philosophical systems deliberately. Instead they claim that suchtransgressions are unpremeditated, unconscious acts for which Boethius should not be held

responsible. In such cases the underlying assumption is that Boethius, like so many of his lateantique contemporaries, wanted to maintain certain distinctions between the ideologicalframeworks that appear in the Consolation; furthermore, that to do so was indeed hisresponsibility (as a loyal Neoplatonist).

One of the reasons for scholarly confusion about Boethiuss true philosophical or religiousloyalties may be attributed to Boethiuss only provisional concern with these distinctions. Usingtheoretical terms and paradigms offered by Derrida in his metaphysical history of Westernreligion, The Gift of Death, I will argue that, rather than being used to maintain certain religiousor philosophical distinctions, Lady Philosophy and Lady Fortunethese corporealrepresentations of Neoplatonic philosophy and of pagan theismare used by Boethius as ameans of incorporation whereby he demonstrates that aspects of pagan theism merge with

Neoplatonism, and aspects of Neoplatonism converge with Christianity. The means by whichthey bring about this incorporation is closely tied to their status as allegorical figures: bydefinition, they are symbols that stand for something else. The presence of allegory makesavailable the possibility for substitution as well as the possibility that a one-to-onecorrespondence between the sign and the thing signified may not hold. I argue that it is theresourcefulness of these transformations of signifiers that chiefly interests Boethius; he is moreinterested in the ability of the twin figures of Philosophy and Fortune to connote multiplemeanings than in their ability to denote one fixed idea.

Derridean Perspectives: Deconstructing the Breaks and Boundaries of

Conversion History

Derridas The Gift of Death offers a powerful and well-theorized framework for interpretingconversionary breaks between what he calls orgiastic fusion (a phrase he uses to characterizethe dynamics of pagan theism), Platonism, and Christianity.8 My use of the term incorporationborrows from his definition: Derrida describes the breaks between these conversionary stages asa process of incorporation and repression in which each new stage contains elements of what


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came before but whose proponents deny that such continuities exist. Through this process ofdenial and repression, Derrida argues, a kind of fantasmatic stability-through-rupture is achieved.

The Consolation does indeed enact a series of incorporations in which paganism becomes part of

Platonism and Platonism merges with Christianity. But Derridas notion that such incorporationis typically paired with repression is more helpful for analysis of the critical reactions to theConsolation than it is for analysis of the text itself. It is precisely because the Consolation rarelyfollows this aspect of the Derridean formulationbecause it makes only provisional efforts torepress and deny the elements of continuity that survive the movement from one conversionarystage to another, because it places far more emphasis upon instances of incorporation withoutrepressionthat this text has for so long proven a conundrum for critics. Derrida argues that tosome extent, stability (or safety) is achieved and retained through rupture. That is, theemphasis upon breaks and separations, and differences between these stages, make it safe for thecontinuities to exist, though to maintain this safety their existence is repressed. The Consolationis an anomaly to the extent that it does not participate in this pattern of denial. Boethius shows

very little interest in enforcing the boundaries maintained by so many of his contemporaries. Byextension, he does not participate in an established formula for making the conversionary processsafe. Because of this anomalous factor, the Consolationwhile very popular in late antiquityand in the mid-to-late Middle Ageswas often, then, perceived as a dangerous text; now, for thesame reason, it is perceived as a bit of a puzzle.9

Some contemporary Boethian critics, when seeking to determine the extent to which theConsolation champions Platonist ideologies over Christian ones, or vice versa, cite assertionsmade by contemporaries of Boethius who were far more invested than was he in maintaining thelines of demarcation between these ideological frameworks. For example, Courcelle, in order toprove his assertion that Boethius prioritized pagan Platonism over Christian doctrine in theConsolation, notes that Boethius used the termsfortuna (fortune) andfatum (fate), which

Augustine had proscribed.10 But Derridas text suggests that those late antique thinkers (such asSt. Augustine) who are most interested in defining clear boundaries and making hermeticdistinctions between one conversionary stage and another may also be those with the deepestinvestment in repressing those elements which are incorporated from other systems. WhenCourcelle accepts Augustines division of the formal and ideological boundaries betweenChristianity and paganism, he can also be said to be participating in the narrative of progressivehistory that Augustine wished to propagate. Augustine makes it a matter of responsibility todistinguish between Christian belief and the pagan ideas denoted by the terms fortuna andfatum.Courcelles historicist formulation of critical responsibility imitates Augustinian method andfollows Augustinian rule. That is, Courcelle uses a historiographical method whereby, to createan historically accurate lens through which to analyze this late antique text, he attempts to view

Boethiuss work from the perspective of the authors scholarly predecessors and contemporaries.But in this case, Courcelles strategy results in an interpretation whereby late antique modes ofinterpretation are reproduced, rather than examined as such. When Courcelle assumes that it ishis own responsibility to confirm the differences between the respective systems of pagan theism


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and Neoplatonism, he follows Augustines advice, but does not delve into what might havemotivated Augustines particular set of interpretive rules.

Derrida offers an abstract and theoretical means of distinguishing between Platonic and Christian

ideologies that proves a very useful supplement to such historicist endeavors: he characterizesthe conversion from the Platonic to the Christian subject as a shift from a viewpoint that purportsto exile mystery and secrecy to one in which they are perceived as constitutional to theconstruction of the subject itself. The Platonic subject, Derrida explains, assumes that it ispossible to achieve an exterior/accessible gaze upon itself and upon the abstract Good of thesummum bonum. This exterior gaze enables the Platonic subject to see itself clearly and to takefull responsibility for its actions. In contrast, Derrida asserts, the Christian subject is marked bythe interior/inaccessible gaze of another subject, a (personalized) God who sees internal secretsfrom which the subject itself is barred. The Christian subject, by definition, will never knoweverything about itself.

As I will show, the Consolation does not place complete confidence in the narrators access toself-knowledge and in the power that such understanding conveys, in true Platonic fashion.Rather, it acknowledges the existence of areas of secrecy which in turn allow for the possibilityof uncertainty and risk, and, ultimately, of faith. If Boethiuss narrator cannot predict how he willbe judgedand consequently rewarded or punishedbecause the contents of his own soul are amystery, he will be forced to rely upon and have faith in Lady Philosophy, the secret sharer towhom his real self is visible.

In the Consolation, Boethius personifies good as the goodness of a personalized authority figurewho sees the internal secrets of the narrator, those parts of the soul that are constitutionallyunreadable to him. But Lady Philosophy is not simply an independent agent in the text of theConsolation. Indeed, one clear implication is that Lady Philosophy is an aspect of the narrator,

Boethiuss I personabecause she represents Boethiuss accumulated philosophicalknowledge. But how is it possible that Lady Philosophy be both an aspect of the narrator andalso an independent agent?

Two centuries before, Augustine created a dialogue founded upon the same seemingcontradiction. In the Soliloquies, he represents his mind in conversation with itself, but expressesthis conversation as occurring between a knowledge-seeking self and a (female) figure whopersonifies Reason. Acknowledging the originality of this narrative structure, Augustine claimedto have invented a genre whose achievement was to internalize the process of dialogue. WhileAugustine uses a question-and-answer dialogue in a pursuit of wisdom, a format that of courseemploys an identifiably Socratic method, what is different about Augustines dialogue is that, asReason points out, we are speaking to ourselves alone; the dialogue is not represented as

occurring between different historical personages.11

The unique status of Reason is apparent inthe opening lines of the Soliloquies:

When I had been pondering many different things to myself for a long time, and had formany days been seeking my own self and what my own good was, and what evil was tobe avoided, there suddenly spoke to mewhat was it? I myself or someone else, inside


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me or outside me? (This is the very thing I would love to know but dont)At any rate,Reason said to me12

The participants in this dialogue are therefore identified as the narrator, the I persona of

Augustine himself, and Reason, whose status is left ambiguous: is she inside the narrator oroutside him, a part of himself or an independent entity? Unlike Boethiuss narrator,Augustines narrator poses this question directly, but he refuses to resolve the query for hisreaders, claiming he is unable to answer it. To further complicate matters, while on the one handReason may be identified with some part of the narrator, on the other hand she seems to operateas a kind of conduit to God himself, insofar as she claims that while it is God himself whoilluminates, it is she upon whom the narrator must rely to display God as clearly to [thenarrators] mind as the sun appears to the eyes.13 Thus Reason is a liminal figure, a kind of go-between who can both stand in for a part of the narrator himself and also act as a divine emissaryof God.

As in the Soliloquies, the dialogue of the Consolation occurs between the authors I personaand a female figure who acts as his instructor. Furthermore, the figure of Reason as one thatmay represent both the narrators own mental powers and, at the same time, act as anindependent agent, bears a striking resemblance to Boethiuss Lady Philosophy. ThoughBoethius himself does not openly acknowledge the fact that she is, in some sense, the product ofhis own mental processes, readers must be aware that Philosophy, as a creation of Boethius theauthor, represents his accumulated philosophical knowledge. Of course, readers might alsoconclude that Boethius the author knows things that his I persona does not. But if we assumethat the abject despair and ignorance of the narrator is a purely artificial device, meant to providethe authorin the guise of Lady Philosophythe opportunity to correct the narrator and displayhis own wisdom, we lose any sense that the professed ignorance of the narrator also expresses anhonest desire for knowledge on Boethius the authors part. Of course, this question is to some

extent unresolvable, but I propose that a more satisfying reading will follow if we assume thatBoethius, like Augustine, is using his own writing process as part of a sincere search for thesalvific knowledge that can comfort him in his plight. The narrator and Lady Philosophy indeedrepresent a split self: their conversation is, in one sense, a dialogue between the helplessunknowing part of the self and the self that knows. Furthermore, like Augustines Reason,Philosophys knowledge seems to come at least in part from her proximity to God. Ultimately,both Reason and Philosophy are liminal figures that can satisfy two kinds of desires viaauthority: as authorities in their own right, they satisfy the desire for a personalized, concrete andaccessible authority figure; as conduits to God, they satisfy the desire for an authority thatpreserves a certain mystery, whose greatness is testified to by the fact that mere mortals cantachieve direct access but must make use of a go-between.

Like Augustines Soliloquies, Boethiuss Consolation represents an internal dialogue, a mind inconversation with itself; like Augustine, Boethius emphasizes learning as a product of solitudeand spiritual contemplation rather than public exposition. Through his internalization of Platonicphilosophy, we see Boethiuss Christianization of Platonic philosophy, because the working out


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of the relationships between two parts of the soul bears the mark of the Christian formulation ofthe secret sharer: Lady Philosophy, a many-faceted symbol, represents both the part of thenarrators soul that knows, and the personalized, subjective gaze of God, an individualrather

than an objective Goodthat gazes upon the narrator and sees him for what he truly is.Philosophys Precarious Consolations

I n the Consolation, Lady Philosophy is cast in the role of a savior who will rescue the Boethiuscharacter from the ruin that random Fortune has made of his life. However, from her firstappearance in the Boethius characters cell, she displays a surprising affinity with the quality ofuncertainty that she has supposedly arrived to abolish. In an essay titled My Chances/MesChances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies, Derrida traces the philologicallinks between the unforeseeable, chance, and the idea of a fall: theunforeseeable[involves]that which falls and is not seen in advanceit comes from above,like destiny or thunderGrasping everything in advance, anticipation, does not let itself be takenby surprise; there is no chance for it.14 The details of Lady Philosophys arrival in the narratorscell link her with the unforeseeable, the fall, and the psychological weight of destiny orthunder, so that in this moment she seems to represent the qualities of chance itself even morethan she does the tenets of philosophy. The abrupt quality of her entrance and her banishment ofthe muses of poetry with whom the prisoner has been beguiling himself mark her as anindependent entity whose arrival is not orchestrated or anticipated by the author; hence herarrival is that of the unforeseen and the unforeseeable. The physical description which reportsthat Lady Philosophys head penetrates the heavens implies her fall from thence: It is difficultto say how tall she might be, for at one time she seemed to confine herself to the ordinarymeasure of man, and at another the crown of her head touched the heavens; and when she liftedher head higher yet, she penetrated the heavens themselves, and was lost to the sight of man. 15The fact that this unanticipated arrival is crucial to the prisoner, that it will make all thedifference to his life, his death, and his soul, invests her arrival with the importance of destinyor thunder. What is initially most frightening about this consolatory figure is that her helpcannot be anticipated, counted upon, or fathomed. Like the misfortune whose randomness is, tothe narrator, its most terrifying aspect, Lady Philosophys arrival seems random, based on herown whim. At the very least, Boethius represents her arrival as something that the prisoner doesnot have the agency to bring about independently. Immediately after her unexpected appearance,Lady Philosophy claims that the narrator is in no real danger, for his only problem is that hehas forgotten his real selfwhich she can help him to recover.16

The idea of banishing danger by recovering certain truths is one that borrows heavily fromPlatonic philosophy. On this score, the Consolation owes perhaps its most significant debt to

Platos Phaedo, in which Socrates, like Boethius, ponders philosophical truths while he awaitsdeath at the hands of his accusers. Yet ultimately, the Consolation revises the Phaedosformulations as to what constitutes true danger and loss. One of the most important revisions isthe Consolations new emphasis on the existence of a forgotten or secret self.


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In the Phaedo, Socrates tries to console his students about his impending death by explainingthat death itself does not constitute a real danger, particularly for the philosopher. The soul,Socrates explains, is united with ideas of the perfect Forms, including the Form of the Good. The

individual is born with a knowledge of these Forms, but forgets them upon being imprisoned inthe body. The philosopher can prepare himself for death by remembering and revering the idealForms that the soul remembers, and by devaluing the worldly goods and possessions that pleasethe body. For this reason, the philosopher can be said to be constantly preparing himself fordeath, and looks upon it as no danger.

For Socrates, the soul is the perceiving agent that, by definition, is not tied to bodily senses.While mortals have never literally seen absolute/ideal beauty or goodness, the soul can perceivetheir Forms, and one can best enhance this perceptual ability by applying [ones] pure andunadulterated thoughtthat is, the intellect unaided by any bodily senseto the pure andunadulterated object.17 It is clear that Socrates places an extremely high premium on this pureintellection, which can give mortals access to pure unadulterated truths and can ultimately

transform what death itself means. It is also clear that Socrates feels quite confident that the pureand unadulterated objects which are the idealized Forms are fully accessible, at least to theperceptual ability of the trained philosopher. His confidence in these invisible but accessibleForms is illustrated by the position he adopts in doing the consolatory work of the Phaedo: it isSocrates himself, the one condemned to death but also the one most highly trained in philosophy,who is least in need of consolation from others. On the contrary, he himself adopts theconsolatory role and tries to comfort his students by helping them to perceive the truths that havelong since comprised his own comfort.

In contrast to the Phaedos emphasis upon the accessibility of the ideal Forms and theirperceptual visibility, the Consolation employs a thematic focus on ways that accessibility tocertain ideal truths may be blocked or obscured. Unlike Socrates, the narrator of the Consolation

has lost sight of the truths that have the power to transform his experience of death, so that,rather than mourning the end of his bodily life, he rejoices in the prospect of his souls eternalunity with the Good. As Philosophy observes, [Once, the narrator] sought and told all Naturessecret causes. / But now he lies / His minds light languishing,His eyes cast down beneath theweight of care, / Seeing nothing / But the dull, solid earth.18 His inability to see anything butthe earth signifies the fact that at this moment, the narrator is preoccupied by the material world:his perceptual powers can only register that which is accessible to the bodily senses. Nor is thenarrator confident that he can regain a clear-sighted visionthat is, the ability to perceive theelevated realm of ideas and idealson his own. Instead, he must rely upon the figure of LadyPhilosophy, whom Boethius represents as an authoritative teacher who can help the narrator torecover what he has forgotten. As noted above, Lady Philosophy can be said to represent an

aspect of the narrator himself, insofar as she is meant to represent his memory of thephilosophical truths he learned in his previous life as a philosopher; he refers to her as the nursewho had brought me up, whose house I had from my youth frequented. If this is the case, thefact that Boethius chooses to represent the narrators self as split or divided between the part thatremembers/knows (Lady Philosophy) and the part that doesnt (his mournful, imprisoned,


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despairing self) suggests the paradoxical possibility that there is self-knowledge from which theself can be barred.19 Furthermore, the narrators need for a figure to return to him the self-knowledge that he lacks also works to emphasize the fact that such a lack exists. Paradoxically,

then, the source of the narrators consolationLady Philosophy and her possession ofknowledge which he has lostalso opens up a dangerous gap between the narrator and thesalvific knowledge of his real self upon which his consolation is said to rest.

Philosophy and Fortune: Guides to the Good and to God

In the first two books of the Consolation, Lady Philosophys lessons center upon the figure ofthe Lady Fortune, whom the narrator identifies as the one who is to blame for his present plight.Before his imprisonment, the narrator was wealthy, respected, and happy. Now, as the self-described victim of adverse fortune, he has been accused of treason against the senate, thrownin jail, and is at present deprived of all [his] goods, stripped of [his] honors, and the object ofevil gossip.20 Lady Philosophy sets out to console him by proving that the world is rationallydirected, rather than being run by random and chance events.21 Initially, then, the twinfigures of Philosophy and Fortune are caught up in an apparent opposition: Philosophy is therepresentative of abstract truth and the rational, though not always evident or visible, force ofdivine order, which ensures that the rewards of salvation and safety are accessible to those whowork for them; Fortune plays her foil as the irrational representative of material wealth, bodilypleasure, and the dangerous power of chance to bestow or withdraw these goods at random. Likeother pagan gods, Fortune is often linked to the idea of degraded materiality, all the more sobecause it is her special province to distribute earthly treasures: Lady Philosophy offers a list ofFortunes useless giftsriches, jewels, fine clothesand scoffs that man can only appearsplendid to himself by the possession of lifeless stuff.22 C. J. de Vogel characterizes LadyFortune as anti-intellectual, anti-reason, and notes that she was the special bane ofphilosophers as a goddess of irrationality and chaos.23 Her reputation for fickleness and capriceand her status as one who gives with one hand and takes with the other imbue her figuration withthe potential for risk and danger that accompany the loss of her gifts. It is this risk and danger (orrather, the perception that this danger is real) that Lady Philosophy must help the narrator toovercome.

However, in the Consolation, the simple oppositional relationship between Lady Philosophy(representative of divine order, the invisible but real and abstract truths of philosophy, safety,and permanence) and Lady Fortune (representative of popular pagan theism, irrationality,material and visible goods, transition, chance, and danger) does not retain its dialectical integrity.The similarities and links between these apparently oppositional figures is suggested whenPhilosophy speaks for Lady Fortune in book 2 (when Fortune speaks, she is quoted directly,

but with the understanding that Lady Philosophy speaks for her; that is, Philosophy speaks as ifshe is Lady Fortune). Ventriloquizing Fortune, Philosophy announces that if the things thatBoethius claims he lost were really his, he never would have lost them. That is, the riches andgood reputation that he formerly enjoyed are earthly treasures and, by their very nature,transitory and mutable. Earthly goods cannotbe permanent possessions; one cannot expect to


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retain them forever, therefore one should never consider them truly ones own. With this retort,Philosophy stands in for Fortune and gives her the voice she needs to defend herself againstthe Boethius characters accusations of ill-treatment.

Philosophy makes an emphatic point of speaking as if she is Lady Fortune, because she wants toconvince the Boethius character that Fortune must be understood on her own terms. Fortune is,by her essential nature, transitory and fickle. She is often accused of being deceptive because shesupposedly seduces the recipients of good fortune into expecting permanent happiness. However,as Lady Philosophy points out, if one truly knows Lady Fortune and understands her basicnaturea nature which Fortune reveals precisely by being changeablethen one learns toexpect change, transition, mutability, and bad fortune as well as good. Fortunes words andactions, as they appear in the Consolation, resonate with the contradictory connotations of theGreek termpharmakon, which is defined as both a poison and a remedy. While the narratorinitially perceives Fortunes actions as poisonous, Philosophy uses Fortunes own words as acurative for Boethiuss ailmentwhich stems, in part, precisely from his initial inability to

understand what Fortune means.When, ventriloquized by Lady Philosophy, Fortune chastises the narrator for overvaluing earthlygoods, she participates in Philosophys Platonic mission to lead the prisoner back to arecognition of what is true. Therefore, while Philosophy has spoken for Fortune, Fortune has alsospoken for Philosophy. Philosophical axioms about Fortune confirm that when she retracts herfavor, she has offered the one who has lost it the opportunity to discover what is transitory in lifeand what is stable and can never be retracted. In other words, by revealing her own limitations asa goddess and emphasizing the fact that what she gives cannot be retained, Fortune gives hermost profound gift and leads the prisoner back toward the Good.

If Fortune reveals a surprising affinity with the Platonic aim of returning to the Good, Lady

Philosophy, as she is figured in the Consolation, seems to have a set of affiliations that link herwith the material world she derides. Lady Philosophy has arrived to help the prisoner brush awaythe illusions foisted upon him by his attachment to the material worldillusions that are linkedto his love of the body and that which pleases the body (i.e., material pleasure). But why doesthis message come to him from thefigure of Lady Philosophy? Given that Lady Philosophysself-ascribed task is to help the prisoner shed his habit of giving excessive importance to thematerial world, why did the author of the Consolation choose to represent philosophy as anembodied presence? Lady Philosophy is not a set of abstract tenets signifying ideation, but acorporealised figure who, like her supplicant, has a physical form. Indeed, this form is describedin great detail: the narrator describes her burning eyes, the freshness of her complexion despitethe fact that she seems ancient, the delicate workmanship of her dress, emblazoned with twoGreek letters signifying the practical and theoretical divisions of philosophy, and the book andscepter that she carries.24 On the one hand, these physical details serve as allegorical signifiers ofphilosophys legendary powers; on the other hand, the fact that she is represented in human formmay also signify her affiliation with certain mortal limitations.


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Many late antique texts that engage in the cultural debate of the pagan vs. the Christian treat asproblematic the allegorical representation of either classical philosophical truths or pagan deitiesin mortal form, precisely because this association with the human figure threatens to contaminate

any idealized purity. Perhaps the most famous text of this kind is Augustines fourth-centurymanifestoDe Civitate Dei Adversos Paganos (The City of God Against the Pagans), in which hepoints out that even the classical traditions most eminent scholars, including Varro, Cicero andSeneca, admit that the practice of representing the gods in human form leads to the belief that thepagan deities are susceptible to various kinds of human weakness.25 The classical scholars citedabove rationalize their tolerance of this disrespectful idea by claiming that only the commonfolk (vulgo) believe in the literal existence of the pagan gods as anthropomorphic figures.According to these scholars, all educated people know that the figures of the gods are meant tobe read allegorically. Augustine reads such rationalizations as elitist hypocrisy: he feels that thehubris of the pagans is in fact their greatest sin.

But Boethius evidences none of the elitism shown by his classical forebears. Instead, he uses the

limitations implied by Lady Philosophys anthropomorphic figuration in the service of furtheringhis syncretism of philosophical and religious traditions. As she is represented in the Consolation,Lady Philosophy never displays the mortal passions that often sway the pagan gods. However,her appearance as a human figure suggests that she represents a particularly mortal wisdom.Lady Philosophy may therefore be said, like the Lady Fortune, to give the most profound giftwhen she reveals her own limitations. Although Lady Philosophy wants to lead the prisoner backto the Good and back to a recognition of/appreciation for God, she cannot approximate Godhimself: at the limit of human wisdom is where God begins.

Lady Philosophys first direct acknowledgment that reason has its limits occurs when, in book 4,the narrator asks how God can mete out harshness to the good and grant the desires of thewicked. Lady Philosophy replies that she will try to explain the depth of God by giving the

narrator those few examples that human reason can grasp; she goes on to say that while someevil men may appearjust and good to their fellow men, to God, who knows all, theirwickedness is apparent.26 Philosophy further claims that though some men seem to be rewardedfor wickedness, providence arranges all things for the ultimate good of all. For example, in thecase of a hypothetical man who has a nature such that the want of property could very likelyprovoke him to crime, providence offers as a remedy for this sickness the provision ofmoney.27 Perhaps in anticipation of protest against this rather unsatisfactory explanation,Philosophy ultimately retorts, But it is grievous that I should t

Hortulus Volume 2 2006

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