On the Sanctity of Boethius

On the Sanctity of Boethius

by Dr. Erik Ellis

In a recent session of a Latin course, a student and I had an interesting exchange relating to the status of Boethius. My question was, “Sanctusne Boethius?,” and the response was an enthusiastic, “Ita vero!” I offered “Sine dubio sanctus est, sed sanctusne habetur?” We then discussed the orthodoxy and martyrdom of Boethius, his presence in the Martyrologium Romanum under the name “Sanctus Severinus,” the preservation of his relics in Pavia, and yet the lack of general recognition of his sanctity. What he is lacking, I argued, is “cultus” and the dignity of having been “raised to the altars.”  In other words, Boethius was a “saint,” and is surely in heaven praying for us and the Church here on earth, but he is not a “Saint,” since his example of heroic virtue has not been held up by the Church as an example worthy of universal imitation and celebration. 

Canonization is today a fairly straightforward process, but this was not so before the Council of Trent. Our modern process was a response to early modern criticisms of medieval superstition. Relics and saints’ lives came under intense scrutiny, and the old informality of popular acclaim yielded to a rigorous process that involves testimonies, devil’s advocates, and the scientific method to authenticate miracles. Many saints lost their place in the calendar or had their cult reduced from universal to local status. The cult of St. Christopher, famously, survived this process and remains as powerful as ever despite its official suppression, while (St.) Charlemagne enjoys a much diminished cult in Aachen, where the cathedral preserves his mortal remains in magnificent reliquaries. Boethius’ death came some thousand years before the Tridentine reform, but his cult never seems to have passed much further than the area around Pavia, the old Lombard capital of the Kingdom of Italy where he met his end.

It is possible that this is due in large part to Boethius being outshone by his “roommate,” St. Augustine. Augustine, of course, died in his native Africa, Vandal pirates and Arab conquest inspired his devotees to move his body first to Sardinia and then to Pavia, where the Ostrogothic kings held court until they, in turn, were replaced by their Germanic and Arian cousins, the Lombards, as lords of Italy. The king who brought Augustine to Pavia, Liutprand, was, unlike his ancestors, a properly catholic and orthodox Christian who wished both to protect the saint’s relics from desecration and to enjoy his company.

The immediate consequences of this move are unclear, but eventually, the greater, theological light of St. Augustine the Confessor tended to obscure the lesser, philosophical light of St. Boethius the Martyr. Using the same sort of aesthetic logic that inspired the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, the guardians of the two saints’ bodies at some point made them into a concrete expression of the abstract relationship of philosophy and theology. The visitor to Pavia will encounter their bodies, glimpsed through glass caskets, with Augustine’s theology stacked atop Boethius’ philosophy. If surviving manuscripts are a good indication, we know that Boethius’ Consolation had more readers, in both Latin and various vernaculars, than Augustine’s Confessions, but Augustine’s cult grew while Boethius’ seems to have, then, as now, attracted much less attention and to have almost been accidentally found by pilgrims whose intended destination was Augustine.

So that he might be rescued somewhat from this relative obscurity, let us now illuminate some aspects of his life and ancestry. Boethius was a descendent of the Symmachi and Anicii, pagan aristocrats who a century before had waged a long war with St. Ambrose to restore pagan worship to the senate and preserve the “mos maiorum,” which they thought had been the guarantee of Roman victory and whose then recent abandonment they considered the cause of the series of calamities that Rome suffered with increasing frequency as the fourth century came to a close. These men had hoped that Constantine would bring imperial government back to Rome after the disturbances of the third century had transformed the imperial office into an almost pure military dictatorship and the possession of soldiers who remained on permanent campaign. Rome’s public buildings were deprived of their function, ceremonies ceased, the continuity of political culture was disrupted, and the City began to fall to ruin. The “Last Pagans” of Rome toiled to preserve what they could of their proud tradition and hoped for a better future. One of Boethius’ ancestors worked with scholars to edit the works of Vergil into a form that is the basis for all subsequent textual traditions for the Poet’s works.  They also sponsored the grammarian Servius, who attempted to summarize the arts of trivium in his massive commentary on Vergil, and the philosopher Macrobius, whose commentary on the Somnium Scipionis was the foundation of the study of the quadrivium for the next millennium.

The Roman restoration that these pagans so deeply desired did not tempt Constantine. He wanted to make Rome a Christian city, so he laid the foundations of the great basilicas and set the papacy on a strong financial basis. These two facts shifted the balance of power away from the aristocracy and moved the center of Rome from the Forum to the Vatican, where the humble, second-century shrine of a Galilean fisherman was being transformed into the grandest building in the world. Having humbled the pagans, Constantine went east to found a properly Christian Rome. In recognition of the changing times, many of the aristocrats embraced the new faith and received baptism, surely with varying degrees of devotion, but all benefitting from the grace that was to transform Roman culture from within with their help.

It was fashionable for a time to consider Boethius a crypto pagan. All such arguments are arguments from silence, which are the weakest of all. Much of what has been written in this vein seems to be projection and wishful thinking, and no one alive during his life or for more than a millennium afterwards found any reason to doubt his Christianity or orthodoxy. In fact, it was precisely Boethius’ orthodoxy, which he demonstrated in his theological tractates, in which he elucidated certain theological difficulties building on Augustine’s De Trinitate, that proved to his Arian king, Theodoric, that his allegiances lie with the catholic emperor in Constantinople rather than with his unorthodox king in Italy. In those days, the powerful found it impossible to distinguish religious confession from political allegiance, and so, according to most accounts and scholarly consensus, Boethius was martyred for orthodoxy and Roman liberty while innocent of treason. It is true that his greatest work, The Consolation of Philosophy, makes no direct mention of Christ or Christian doctrine, but such silence does not equal a repudiation. In fact, it is hard to believe that some demonstration in favor of Arianism, and therefore of Theodoric’s domination of the Church as well as the state would not have saved Boethius’ life. In the sixth century, he was condemned for not coming out in favor of Arianism. In the nineteenth and twentieth, he was condemned for not explicitly defending orthodoxy in his final work, even though he had done so with much skill several times before.

In his silence, as in much else, he bears no small resemblance to St. Thomas More. It took precisely four centuries for the Church to declare the sanctity of Thomas More, despite recognition immediately after his death from those on both sides of the Reformation that he had suffered and died for the sake of the Church and had lived an exemplary life. In fact, as a brilliant writer, the longsuffering catholic servant of a heretic and schismatic king, falsely accused of treason, Thomas More inspired his contemporaries to hail him as the “New Boethius” and condemn Henry as the “New Theodoric.” Many reasons are given for the Church’s lack of dispatch in canonizing More, but most agree that it was simply politically inexpedient in the centuries when English Catholics had no civil rights and endured constant suspicion that they, too, might turn treasonous.

Now that the threat of invasion from Arian Germanic tribes is considerably smaller than it was in the sixth century, and Boethius’ Consolation is firmly established as a canonical text in many high schools and universities, it is to be hoped that the author and martyr may enjoy the extension of his cult beyond Pavia, witnessing to the harmony of faith and reason, the independence of the Church, and the preservation of Roman liberty under law. As a model for Christian humanists, both ancient and modern, St. Boethius shows us that contemplation and action, private erudition and public service, poetry and prose, the practical and the theoretical, and philosophy and theology, are parts of a seamless garment rather than opponents. 

Sancte Boethii, ora pro nobis!

Dr. Erik Ellis is Assistant Professor of Classical Education at the University of Dallas and a Senior Fellow of the Boethius Institute