59 - Introduction to Boethius (Updated)

when my family was hit by COVID recently. I was the first is to come and I was still able to get some work done from home at that point, but then my wife caught it and she's pregnant and so she definitely had it worse than I did. And then my two year old daughter had it worst of all, and so it was definitely an all hands on deck situation, which put me behind on some things, but I mean, of course I'm going to choose my family when things

like this happen. Then, as a plan B, I had a topic that I hope to discuss as a standalone episode, but I wasn't able to get around to that either as I was playing catch up, and so today I bring you my plan. See, as you likely know if you've been listening along, I'm currently teaching my second independently led course, which is called Life, Death and Meaning with Beowulf and Boethius. We just started on the Boethia section, and so I'm going to provide you today with the

audio from my introduction to the Constellation of Philosophy. This is an incredible text, and whether you're in the course or not, I strongly recommend that you pick up this book if you've not done so already. This is a brilliant, ever timely medieval wisdom that you can readily jump right into, even if you've never read any medieval or even any philosophical text up to this point. Now, of course, familiarity with such texts will likely enrich your reading of Boethius.

But Boethius can definitely stand on his own. He's very accessible, and I hope that this brief introduction proves helpful to you. If you'd like to join the course, it's not too late, as you will have indefinite access to all the materials for Beowulf and Boethius, and so you're always welcome to go through it whenever you can and at whatever pace works for you. And if you enrolled during the month of September, you can use the code Fortune to get

half off the cost. To enroll, just go to Andrew Snyder dot Patia dot com or click the link in the show notes and now here we go. Hello, welcome back, as we get started on Boethius's The Constellation of Philosophy. Now, this is an incredible text. I've read it roughly once a year for the last probably ten years or so. At this point, it's probably the book that I've read the most. Definitely one of my top five books of

all time. And that says a lot because I've read a lot of books, but I think that there's just so much medieval wisdom packed into the pages. Now, I'm not going to spend a lot of time getting into the historical background, because I mean, honestly, that's just something that you can find elsewhere. You don't need me to

lay that out for you. But I did provide a video in the course in this week's module that goes over the historical context really well, and so if you're not already very familiar with the period of time that surrounds the fall of Western Rome, then definitely take a look at that video does a great job of setting it up and leading us into Bowethius's historical context. But most directly to the point, Boethius is living in the

city of Rome. It's being governed by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. Well, even though the barbarians are in charge, they're still keeping the basic infrastructure of Rome in place. And so the Roman Boethias, the philosopher, the senator, the console, in fact even a personal advisor for a time to King Theodoric.

This is a guy who has lived his life according to virtue, according to Christian faith, holding true to Nicene Trinitarian orthodoxy, despite the fact that his Ostrogothic king is an Aryan, because the Germanic peoples in large part were converted when the Roman Empire was Aryan itself. And so the Aryan Romans send out these missionaries to the Germanic peoples convert them to Aryan Christianity, while eventually Rome comes to adopt Nicene orthodoxy. They affirm the trinitarian nature of God.

They say that Christ is indeed of the same substance as the Father. But then the Aryan Germanic peoples come in and conquer, and so now we've got these Aryan kings ruling over Trinitarian Catholics. But nonetheless, Boethia seemed to be doing okay for a time, but eventually, after routing out some corruption and making some enemies, lady fortune seemed to have turned on him as he was falsely accused of conspiring with the Roman Emperor in the East, which

we would now usually call Byzantium. He supposedly was conspiring with the Roman Emperor in the East in order to get them to come and invade Italy and essentially reincorporate Italy into the Empire. And then also, just to add to the charges, he was also accused of witchcraft and some occultish things like that. All these accusations seem to be entirely baseless, and so it definitely seems like we have an innocent man who was just kind of set

up and became a victim of fortune. And so now despite living his life as a good man by any reasonable standard, well now he finds himself imprisoned. I mean more like something like house arrest. He's not sitting in a dungeon, but he is imprinsoned. He is confined. He has had all of his honors, his prestige, his fortunes, have been stripped away from him as he's awaiting his sentencing.

And I don't know exactly what Boethius expected was going to happen, but as history will tell us that at the end of the sentencing he would indeed face execution. According to tradition, he was actually bludgeoned to death by a cudgel, and so that's how he meets his end. And so what we have here is the story of a good man who has had external goods stripped away from him, and now he's left wondering, well, what is goodness? What am I? Who am I? Where can I find freedom?

Where can I find goodness? Even in my current state when all of these external goods have been stripped away. And we're going to get some really profound reflections from this, things that we can readily apply to our own lives. So can immediately apply to our own lives, because we all live in a world that's given over to change. We've all experienced that to some degree or another, when wealth has been ripped away from us, when relationships have just fallen apart or maybe just turned sour on us

through no obvious fault of our own. You know, maybe you've fallen into some kind of health crisis, or somebody close to you has done so, and the natural response is to be wondering, where is the goodness of God in this? What even am I when? And this value structure that I built my life around has now been ripped away. I've lost some fundamental existential pillars to my life. What still stands? And so these are perennially human questions,

These are perennially Christian questions. Right. We even see these kinds of questions in Scripture. If God is good and God is in control, then why does it seem that the wicked so often prosper while the righteous suffer? Right? These are very real questions, and I think Boethius does a great job of handling them. And we're also going to see some continuity in themes between our Bay of

Study and Boethius. Remember in Beowulf, what made him a stable character from beginning to end is the fact that he wasn't moved by external fortunes. This is somebody who is always presently minded. He rebukes Rowthgar for being overly concerned with the past and tells him to bear his present concerns, the idea being that all you ever have is the present. The only thing you ever have to

decide is your response to present fortune. You decide how you relate to fortune, whether it be good or whether it be bad. But fortune can never make you into a victim. Only you can do that. And so we see this implicitly throughout Boef's story. We're gonna see it explicitly in Boethius's story, and so there's some strong continuity

in themes. Here. Is just going to take these themes and be more precise with them, be more explicit with them, seeing as this is more of an explicitly philosophical text, whereas beoel if it's more of an implicitly philosophical text. Now, I want to spend the rest of this introduction talking about a few texts that might be helpful to you. The realms of fairy are wild and often dangerous, and one should never embark on a quest unprepared and unarmed.

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the Penguin edition. Here this is the first one that I read about a decade ago, and this is the one that is all marked up for me. Pages. Bent has got some signs aware on it, but I think that's what a good book should look like after a few years. Well, I really like this edition. I feel like the language really is aesthetically fitting of the material. I feel like even the prose sections have the right

poetic heart to them. You feel like this is coming from an impassioned man who desperately is in search for the truth. He's in search for the beautiful, he's in search for the good, And I feel like that just flows from the language really well here, both in the pros as well as in the poetry, and so just on a purely esthetic level, this is the favorite edition that I have looked at, favorite translation I've looked at. Now, another way you can go with this is the Oxford

World claud six edition. But frankly, I mean I've looked through this a good bit and I just don't like it as much. I feel like they try to make the language a little bit too modern if it feels like a more dynamic translation where they're trying to connect with the modern audience more and I feel like in so doing, they lose some of the substance. The pros loses its poetic value. In fact, even the poetry, I

think loses something as well. For one thing, they make the versus rhyme, which to me tells me that they're probably being a little bit fast and loose with the translation by looking for rhyming words making that a priority. But I actually think that despite the fact that they try to add some rhyme, they try to make it more palatable to what we might expect from poetry in the modern era. I actually think that they lose it some of this poetic value. It loses some of its substance,

some of its power. And so I'm just not very impressed with this edition. But it's another way that you can go if you want to. Now, for something a little bit more unconventional, perhaps there is a translation from the Old English edition of Boethius that's put out by the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. Now this is really interesting, and so this is the translation that came into Old English, supposedly by Alfred the Great, the ninth century Anglo Saxon king.

But whether it was translated by his hand or at least closely associated with him. It's really interesting because Alfred or whoever translated this into Old English, did take some creative license in the translation, and so there are some substantial changes made here. For example, lady philosophy becomes recast as the masculine Wisdom, which may be an attempt to further link this guide with Christ, that is my assumption.

There and again and again we see that this edition tamps down some of the classical pagan references that the Latin version gives us and makes it a little bit more explicitly Christian. And so it's just really interesting to see how they wanted to translate not just the words, but translate some of the ideas into Anglo Saxon sympathies, and so it's just it's really interesting to look at.

I don't recommend making this your soul translation to read, but it's really interesting to read alongside a more conventional translation from the Latin. It's really nice that comes with this edition, comes with a nice ribbon bookmark. You've got the Old English on one side, you've got Modern English on the other, and so it's definitely something worth adding to your library and reading alongside or reading after you read one of the more conventional translations from the Latin,

and so definitely interesting to take a look at that. Now, another text that I do recommend to you is Joshua gives how to Be Unlucky Reflections on the pursuit of virtue. Joshua Gibbs is a classical instructor of literature, and he has just a lot of great reflections on here as he reflects on a number of things, but he really

uses the constellation of philosophy as his framework. He keeps going back to it again and again and discussing how to be unlucky right, how to untether yourself from the idea of luck, and how to maintain stable virtue despite

changing fortunes, and so very much a Boithian theme there. Now, if you are an educator in some form of another, whether you teach at a classical Christian school, you're a college instructor, you have some kind of teaching role, maybe in a church setting, then this gets a double recommendations from me because he often will apply these lessons to pedagogy, in particular to how we construct lessons, how we teach the relationship that we should have with the classroom with students,

and so this is a good recommendation for everybody, but if you are a teacher in some capacity gets double recommendation, definitely pick this up. Next, we have The Discarded Image

by C. S. Lewis. Now, this is an exploration of Medieval and Renaissance literature in order to pull out something like the world view, the way that they Medievals, especially as was the early Renaissance figures, the way that they viewed the world, viewed the cosmos in their place therein their approach to learning, their approach to virtue, their approach

to what it means to be human. Now, if you're not already very familiar with medieval and Renaissance literature, then a lot of this can be very overwhelming, and it's definitely not one of the easier Lewis text to read. But it is good and it is worth reading through, even if at first you have to jump around a little bit. You know, read the chapter on the Medieval view of the cosmos on the heavens. Look at the index to find the many times that he talks about Boethius.

He refers to the constellation number of times. In fact, the constellation played such an important role for Lewis that Lewis said that to develop an appreciation for the constellation of philosophy is almost to become naturalized in the Middle Ages, And of course for Lewis to say that, I mean,

that's a pretty big deal. And so as far as getting some more direct insights into the constellation of philosophy, as well as some broader insights into the world in which Boethius was writing from the background themes and ideas, then definitely pick up the discarded image by C. S. Lewis. And also because I think it would be helpful, I am going to include a portion of the video that I did for Out of the Side on the Planet in

the CS. Lewis course that deals with the medieval view of the cosmos, and because Boethius is going to make some references to these cosmological ideas, and so it would be helpful if you weren't in that course. I know a number of you were in that course, but if you weren't, I think would be helpful to get that framework to catch some of what Boethius is doing. And obviously we'll talk about that more as we go through the text. Now, perhaps for some unexpected recommendations. My dissertation.

My doctoral dissertation was on Carekereguard, and I've come to find that his psychological text, namely the concept of anxiety and the sickness unto death, pair very well with Boethius. They deal with some very similar themes. Now, these are notoriously difficult texts to just jump right into. The entry point to Carikeguard is far more steep than it is

to Boethius. But if you can get a handle on what Carecard is doing, that I think you'll find this to be a very profound set of companions for Boethius. And I'll reference Kirkgard at least a few times as we go through our Boethius study now as aids to reading alongside Carikereguard. My first podcast series on the Mythic Mind Legacy podcast goes through the concept of anxiety and

the sickness unto death. And so those might be helpful companions for you to make sense out of what Kckergard is doing, give you a guide for some of his major ideas. Now, at some point I would love to have to put together a whole course on Cairkeguard, because I would love to go more deeply into the text on a chapter by chapter basis than we get in the podcast series that I did. And also, frankly, I mean the podcast series at this point is a few

years old. I feel like I just have a better handle on it and could present the information a little bit better now, but the podcast could at least be a holdover until I get something like that together at some point in the future. But that gives you, I think, a good bit to get started with. I really hope that you enjoy this text, that you appreciate it even a fraction as much as I do. I hope that it gives you a pathway to gaining a richer experience

with reality, a more healthy experience with fortune. And I hope that you come to better understand who you are in the glorious cosmic cathedral in which we live. For now until next time, godspeed. Thank you for listening, and as a reminder, you can own all the materials from the Beowulf and Boethia's course by going to Andrew Sneyder dot Patia dot com or by clicking the link in the show notes and use the code Fortune for half

off the cost. During the month of September and now before we go, I want to take a moment to thank by name all of my current patrons who are the second tier of support and hire, and so many thanks to Mark Cliff, Aaron, Paul William, Aaron, Andrew Brandon, Christopher, Ian, Emmy, Jeremiah, Joscelyn, Joshua Landon, Matthew and Steel and of course thank you

to all of my Tier one patrons as well. Also as a reminder, I have a fairly new benefit set up for Tier three patrons as I'm currently releasing on a weekly basis content from my fiction and philosophy of CS Lewis course, including the videos as well as the the audio to go into the patroon podcast feed and

so we have both ways of accessing it now. So far this includes content regarding all three of the Ransom books, so out of the Side on Planet Parilandra and that Hideous Strength, and that strength actually has three weeks to it, and so there's a lot of content there as well as the Screwtape letters and the abolition of Man. Coming up next will be a couple weeks up till we

have faces. And so go ahead and sign up at the Tier three level to get access to all of that, and for patrons at that level, at the Tier three level, there's really never been as much Mythic Mind content as there is right now, also for patrons of any tier, even just the five dollars a tier. We are just about to start our first book club on the Poetic ed Up, which is one of our main sources of

information on Norse myths and legends. And so just go to patreon dot com slash Mythic Mind or click the link in the show notes and that's it for now until next time. Godspeed. You may have noticed that there we're no annoying auto populated ads at the beginning or throwing to the middle of the show, and that's thanks to our current sponsor, middle Born Arms. I previously relied on those autopopulated ads, but to be honest, I know

that they're basically soulless. I much prefer supporting real people through arrangements that work for both of us. If you have something to advertise, whether a product, a service, or a platform, send me a message where we can work out some kind of partnership. You can DM me on Twitter at andrew in Snyder or email me at Mythicmindpodcast at gmail dot com.