Chip Kendrick

Two Trends in Mid-Transition

	In the disintegration of the classical world, on the verge of the 'dark ages', several 
attempts were made to fully explain Christian teachings and make them accessible and 
logically consistent.  Among these were Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy and St. 
Augustine's Confessions.  To make a large generalization, the writing of these books is 
historically at the brink of classical philosophy giving way to the more stable form of 
Christianity seen in medieval Europe.  Here my notions of classical and medieval 
thinking are defined by the style of thought, i.e., classical, mathematical, external 
thinking based on reason versus medieval, internal, emotional thinking based on faith.  
Attempts at merging any part of the classical understanding of the world directly with the 
medieval idea of a personified God were failing badly, and while there are many counter 
trends represented by various philosophers, in general Europe was moving toward a more 
internalized version of Christianity.  On this brink that I have postulated, Augustine and 
Boethius embody the trend and the counter trend respectively.  Augustine leans heavily 
toward the personified God, and while he turns a powerful intellect toward understanding 
himself (e.g. his memory and his ability to reason), he does not in general face the 
physical paradoxes that the existence of the Christian God brings into play.  Boethius, on 
the other hand, is very ready to take for granted his faculty of reason, and uses it to solve 
the apparent paradoxes of the omniscient God.  In his external understanding of the 
world, Boethius seems to be a very classical thinker if not a Renaissance thinker 1000 
years early. Augustine, with his internal delving and struggles against himself., moves us 
toward the middles ages glibly.
	The first example of this classical/medieval split appears in Augustine and 
Boethius' differing conception of the source of evil.  Both indicate that men strive for 
happiness, and that the supreme happiness is God.  Boethius views worldly joys as valid 
and worthwhile, only imperfect and incomplete: 

"Then these false causes of happiness [honor, power, fame and joy] are mere appearances 
of the true good and merely seem to give certain imperfect goods to mortal men; but they 
cannot give true and perfect good." 
Augustine, on the other hand, gives no worth to any joy that is not the joy of God: 
"Happiness is to rejoice in you [God] and for you and because of you.  This is true 
happiness and there is no other."   Boethius is therefore more of an external thinker in 
that he gives worldly happiness some value whereas Augustine gives it none, defining 
happiness as an internal resonance with God, and any other pursuit as evil, not partially 
good.  Augustine furthermore views failure to seek God as the true happiness as the fault 
of the flesh: "I plunged again into the things of this world.  The weight I carried was the 
habit of the flesh".(p.151 Confessions)  The flesh is also seen as the source of wickedness 
and of externalization: "And when I asked myself what wickedness was, I saw that it was 
not a substance but perversion of the will when it turns aside from you [God]... and 
becoming inflated with desire for things outside itself."(p.150 Confessions)  In contrast to 
Augustine's struggle against a body which is perverting his will, Boethius sees striving for 
worldly happiness as an intellectual misunderstanding of the true nature of happiness.  
This intellectual misunderstanding is more external in that reason is a faculty shared by 
all people, and someone who has misunderstood happiness may be taught otherwise, 
whereas someone made helpless by their own internal will is at odds with a deeper level 
of themselves, and cannot be simply 'convinced'.
	Augustine's internal, near bestial struggles against his own body are 
characteristically medieval (at least as defined above), but his intellectual analysis of this 
struggle is not.  In particular, Augustine's use of his own experience as part of his 
argument for his view of happiness is something seen more often in the Renaissance, in 
thinkers like Christine de Pizan.  Boethius is far more confident is his own ability to 
reason about God, and to do as his mind dictates that he should do.  The Consolation 
focuses not on following a moral code, but on deriving one.  This is a fully classical 
perspective, in that heroes of classical literature typically endure unbelievable torment 
and yet still move toward their chosen goal.  The perfect example is Odysseus: in his trip 
home he encounters and endures more than seems possible, all the while having no 
trouble staying within the Greek definition of virtue.  So at least in some small sense, 
Augustine's thinking is somewhat Renaissance, though his topics and conclusions are 
very medieval.  The manner in which Augustine seems Renaissance (i.e. using personal 
experience) is not at all classical, however, so that Augustine still represents a trend away 
from classical thought if not entirely toward medieval thought.  Boethius' topics, thinking 
and conclusions are all very classical.
	In Boethius and Augustine's approach of the problem of free will and 
determinism, we see an even more clear split.  Augustine, in fact, fails almost completely 
to deal with the problem, stating that there is no paradox, only a misconception.  
Augustine would rather try to understand his own ability to remember, in particular to 
remember joy and sorrow, than to discuss the physical existence of God.  Here the 
internal/external split is once again visible, and becomes even more defined as we 
explore Boethius handling of the free will/determinism paradox.
	First of all, Boethius has a habit of reverse-engineering the nature of God.  That is 
to say that given the existence of God, given that there is both deterministic knowledge 
and free will, Boethius derives the physical form of God.  While this is extremely 
classical in itself, Boethius' phrasing of the nature of God has a clear and precise 
mathematical equivalent which Boethius seems to describe in the best fuzzy terms he has 
available.  For instance: "... if we may aptly compare God's present vision with man's, He 
sees all things in his eternal present as you see things in your temporal present." (p.117 
Consolation)  Boethius has placed God outside of time: "It [God's knowledge] 
encompasses the infinite sweep of past and future, and regards all things in simple 
comprehension as if they were now taking place." (p.116 Consolation) Boethius sees God 
as at a different perspective from man: God views space-time holistically, not from the 
perspective of a single point in time, but as the entire line of time.  Put into 
mathematical/physical terms, Boethius is very clearly saying that we live in a fourth 
dimensional space-time energy-mass system, and that God's existence constitutes a 
higher dimensionality.
	This is about as classical as you can get and still call yourself Christian, for 
Boethius has in some sense formalized God.  In his doing so, he has split very sharply 
with Augustine.  Boethius new conception of the nature of God makes it very difficult to 
project a personality onto God's existence, and very difficult to imagine the interactions 
between God and humans depicted in, for instance, Genesis.  In total contrast to this, 
Augustine's every word in the Confessions is addressed directly to God, and Augustine 
attributes human characteristics to God throughout the Confessions: "In this too, my God, 
let me acknowledge your mercy from deepest depths of my soul!" (p.139 Confessions) 
Boethius never addresses God at all, instead having a conversation with Lady Philosophy 
about a very abstract object, whose human traits tend toward wisdom, knowledge and 
power rather than mercy.
	In general trend, then, Augustine was a medieval, internal thinker and Boethius 
was a classical thinker trying to understand how God fit in the physical universe.  It is 
still questionable whether or not the definitions of classical and medieval thought used 
are accurate enough to place Augustine and Boethius in either category, but we have at 
least seen the extent to which each author was an external or internal thinker.  In any case 
this split in thinking exists today: we refer to it as scientific versus literary thinking, or 
more colloquially, techie versus fuzzy thinking.  In one sense it is an obvious place to 
split: given that we are capable of understanding the universe, will we more quickly 
approach truth by studying the universe or the way it is understood?  The answer is most 
likely a blend of approaches, which is what we can hope that our modernity, in its 
studying of ancient thought, will represent.

Works Cited

Boethius (1962). The Consolation of Philosophy. NewYork, NY: Macmillian Publishing.
St. Augustine (1961).  Confessions.  London, Eng: Penguin Books.
  Boethius (1962). The Consolation of Philosophy. NewYork, NY: Macmillian Publishing. p.59
  St. Augustine (1961).  Confessions.  London, Eng: Penguin Books. p.228
All subsequent quotations are from these texts and will include the 
page number  and the first word in the texts names