Thomas M. Ward, After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher. Word on Fire Academic, 2024. $34.95. 216 pp.
I used to own a weekender sailboat in San Diego. I named it Boethius. One day when a racing yacht swooshed past, a crew member sitting with his legs over the upwind rail called out to me: "Boethius! Consolation of Philosophy!” I immediately smiled at him and signaled with a thumb up. As he and his boat surged ahead, I assumed he was a man more thoughtful than most.
October 23, 2024, marked the 1,500th anniversary of the execution of my boat’s namesake, the last Roman philosopher. But what is a millennium and a half in human history? We live in Boethian times. Now, as then, the center does not seem to hold. Despair looms. In his book After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher, Baylor University philosophy professor Thomas M. Ward wants to make Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy “intelligible and attractive” for modern readers.
The Consolation may rightly seem alien to us at first glance. It is an imagined philosophical dialogue between the author and Philosophy. Boethius composed it while in prison awaiting execution. But Ward invites “readers to struggle toward the hope it has fostered in so many people in the millennium and a half since Consolation was written.”
“We are all existentialists now, and we can hardly bear it,” Ward states matter-of-factly. The ancient Stoics had good advice for such times, as they “identified one of the secret ingredients of the happy (or unhappy) life.” Put simply, that secret ingredient was the goddess Fortune and her wheel. It taught Stoics to accept life calmly and to be apathetic to vicissitudes of fortune. But Boethius had a better guide. Appearing to him as an angel, Philosophia (Lady Philosophy or Lady Wisdom, as she is called in different translations) taught him the wisdom of transcendent hope in troubled times.
The times were troubled theologically, no less than politically. By the time Boethius wrote his Consolation of Philosophy, the trinitarian orthodoxy of Christianity had lost most of its influence in the West. With Vandals at the gates of Hippo, Augustine died hoping for the survival of trinitarian-scriptural orthodoxy. A century later, Boethius died hoping for the same revival.
In his novel, Citadel of God, Louis de Wohl tells the story of Boethius and two of his friends, the scribal bureaucrat Cassiodorus and the pious young idealist who will eventually be canonized as St. Benedict. Things didn’t turn out well for these three. Boethius was brutally executed. Cassiodorus retired to his library. Benedict retreated to the Monastery (now Abbey) of Monte Cassino. But eventually, over the course of centuries, things got better. Europe was born. Biblical and creedal Christianity flourished again. The whole globe was eventually evangelized. And time and again, people find hope in Boethius’s Consolation yet again.
Transcending Lady Fortune’s wheel and her Stoic apathy, Boethius shows every generation of new readers that while Stoicism has its merits, “it tilts fatalistic.” Philosophia, by contrast, dressed in the robes of the liberal arts, is “therapeutic”—in the best, truly soul-healing sense. So what is consoling in the Consolation? In answering this question, Ward refers often to C. S. Lewis. The link to Lewis helps us see Boethius and late antique Christianity as extending soul-care therapy for our times.
C. S. Lewis thought himself “a new, British Boethius,” a characterization others have noted as well—consider Jason M. Baxter’s The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis and Chris Armstrong’s Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis. Living in Boethian times of his own, Lewis believed he, like Boethius, offered others the hope of Christian wisdom in their age of crisis. The parallels to Lewis remind that our own Boethian times are not merely the result of recent swings in presidential elections. We moderns have been living in an age of crisis for at least a century.
To show how Christian wisdom transcends Stoicism, Ward compares Boethius’s Consolation to C.S. Lewis’s novels Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) and Till We Have Faces (1956). In Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Sir Reepicheep the Mouse affirms the Stoic belief that “suffering with fortitude” can ennoble us. But this “is not the sort of good that can make us truly happy.” Orual in Till We Have Faces thinks she can write an autobiography, but the problem, like Boethius’s problem initially, is that her autobiography is focused on herself. To transcend Stoicism, one must decenter the self and find happiness in God. Happiness is not a self-improvement project.
So what about Boethius’s Consolation is after Stoicism? Ward distinguishes the long-term happiness that Philosophia describes from the short-term happiness many expect today. Our happiness lies in God, Boethius’s Philosophia ultimately argues: “In the sublimest and most difficult image of the whole Consolation, Lady Philosophy imagines God as the still center, or axis, of turning concentric circles.”
This image is the foil to the wheel of Lady Fortune—this “still center” is where the Consolation shows the Christian hope that can only come after Stoicism. Philosophia teaches that “We are creatures of the peripheries, invited to come closer to the center… We have the capacity, not only in thought but through the pursuit of virtue, to ‘seek the center of things.’” Ward then quotes from Lewis’ Perelandra: “We have come, last and best, / From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled, / To that still centre where the spinning world/ Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.”
Boethius in Consolation, like Dante in Paradiso (indeed, Ward compares Beatrice to Philosophia), and Lewis in his books, teaches a further-up-and-further-in type of centering on the sovereign, loving, beautiful, and happy God of Christianity. Having transcended Stoicism, Augustine and Boethius stand at the foundations of an Age of Faith.
As philosopher, Thomas Ward writes of Boethius’s long influence on ontological arguments for God. (A cultural history of the influence of Consolation of Philosophy would be a massive project.) He traces the influence of the Consolation through Anselm, through Duns Scotus, ultimately to Alvin Plantinga. Ontological arguments aside, Ward wants his readers to think of the implications of the Consolation’s insistence that “God is happiness.” Seek God. Seek the center. Ultimately, Ward wants his readers to have a reason to pray. “When I pray,” he writes, “I sometimes realize that I am doing the best thing I know how to do, which is just what Jesus taught his disciples to do.” Indeed, the Consolation is an account of a thoughtful person at prayer.
I am among those who cling to an old and frayed copy of the Consolation of Philosophy. The book itself is rather thin as a trinitarian text; but happily, the copy I was given for Christmas of 1981 is a Loeb edition that includes Boethius’s “Theological Tractates.” Boethius’s advocacy of the authority of the Old and New Testaments and Trinitarian orthodoxy are best seen in these accompanying texts. Ward greatly strengthens his own book by offering a concluding chapter on these texts and Boethius’s Christian orthodoxy.
Ward concludes After Stoicism by defending the canonization of Boethius as “St. Severinus Boethius, martyr.” Today St. Boethius is buried in the same church as St. Augustine. It seems appropriate, as both their lives and minds testify to the wisdom of hope when the center does not seem to hold.
Rick Kennedy is author of The Winds of Santa Ana: Pilgrim Stories of the California Bight (2022), The First American Evangelical: A Short Life of Cotton Mather (2015), and A History of Reasonableness: Testimony and Authority in the Art of Thinking (2004). He is professor of history and environmental studies at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego.
