- The Prisoner's Philosophy: Life and Death in Boethius's Consolation
This volume makes good (and more) on a promise that the author made in his Ancient Menippean Satire (1993), namely, to use that tradition to offer an interpretation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. Building on a trend in recent scholarship to reclaim the Consolation as a Christian work, on his own well-received translation of the Consolation (2001; rev. ed., 2003), and on the literary criticism associated with Northrop Frye and Mikhail Bakhtin, Relihan argues that attentiveness to the ironies typical of Menippean satire can help to resolve the problem that is presented by the lack of any explicit testimony to Boethius's Christian faith within the Consolation. Had Boethius somehow found his religion insufficient for coping with his prison experience and reverted to philosophy for comfort in the face of imminent death? Going beyond the stance that the Consolation has merely some latent religious convictions, Relihan argues that Boethius is using the resources of Menippean satire to show the limits of pagan philosophy and the need to turn to prayer instead.
Named after Menippus the Cynic, only fragments of whose work have survived, the genre has often been employed to express philosophical ideas in dialogue form. The Menippean satire used by figures like Seneca, Lucian, Fulgentius, and Martianus Capella typically involves the mixture of story-telling and moral theory and uses the different voices possible in the dialogue-form to represent not only distinct characters and their arguments but distinct character-types, often treated in terms of the theory of the classical humors. Boethius adds in the mixture of prose and poetry, sets the scene as a visit by the persona Philosophy to the prison where he himself languishes, and portrays her as a physician determined to heal his afflictions by a graduated set of intellectual therapies. Relihan makes a powerful case for the view that (as in so much other Menippean satire, ancient and modern) Boethius is deliberately having the synthesis ostensibly being offered as the solution fails, so as to undermine that project in the name of some other ideal. In the Consolation the "Muse" Philosophy does not succeed in actually consoling the one whom she calls "the exile." So, "the prisoner" (Boethius's term for himself in the dialogue) needs to take the humbler route of prayer when the claims to provide a theodicy capable of reconciling the free choice of the human will with perfect divine knowledge (even of future contingents) fails.
Relihan's analysis of this famous text clearly depends on establishing a point that has generally gone unrecognized in the scholarship on Boethius, namely, that the Consolation is deeply critical of the intellectual synthesis that the figure of Philosophy presents. Wisely he devotes several long sections of the book to a consideration of the ways in which the Consolation has been received over the centuries. He deals not only with the commentators who have preferred to take it more literally as a straightforward work of philosophy and [End Page 481] who have seen the character Philosophy as providing an experience of anamnesis for the forgetful Boethius. He also analyzes a number of works that have imitated the Consolation in the medieval, Renaissance, and modern periods, including some that have attempted to use the subtle patterns of irony in the hope of teaching a deeper point by ensuring the failure of a surface-level argument. Clearly Relihan's favorite modern example of this technique is John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces, a work with more deep-seated echoes of Boethius than the reader might initially suspect.
Mindful of the controversial nature of such a thesis, Relihan rakes his own position over the coals of likely objections and rigorously attempts to provide alternate explanations for the structure of the work, the characterization of the figures in the dialogue, the practice of alternating prose and poetry, and the use of numerous literary devices. He also supplies some...