Boethius Speaks To Voters At The Polls

A 1,500-year-old word for our day in politics

I’ve recently become obsessed with Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. C.S. Lewis listed it in his top 10 books and I completely understand why. If you are a regular reader of this newsletter, you will certainly be seeing Boethius pop up more and more in the future.

While I read it, one section stood out to me where Lady Philosophy talks to Boethius about “the dignities of high office and the exercise of power." Maybe it’s just because we’re in an election season, but I couldn’t help but see it as a 1,500-year-old word for our day.

Boethius was killed in prison for saying these kinds of things. These are not popular things to say. But I believe they are wise. And if we would heed the words of Lady Philosophy in our day, it seems to me that we would all find more consolation for many of our political anxieties.

With that said, I’ve decided to share the full section from The Consolation of Philosophy here. But please, if you find this compelling, consider reading the whole book.

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VI

I should like to say something about the dignities of high office and the exercise of power, but I am at a loss because in your ignorance of the true nature of power and dignities people like you exalt themselves to high heaven in virtue of the offices they hold. Now, whenever high office has fallen into the hands of wicked men, the disaster has been greater than flood or volcanic eruption. You remember, I am sure, how (principle of freedom though it had been) your ancestors wanted to abolish the consulship because of the arrogance of the consuls, just as before that the same arrogance had led them to abolish the title of king. If, on the other hand, the very rare case arises when these offices fall to honest men, surely the only aspect of them which finds favour is the honesty of the men who hold the offices. It follows, if this is so, that honour is not accorded to virtue because of the office held, but to the office because of the virtue of the holder.

'However, let us examine this much lauded and much sought after power of yours. You creatures of earth, don't you stop to consider the people over whom you think you exercise authority? You would laugh if you saw a community of mice and one mouse arrogating to himself power and jurisdiction over the others. Again, think of the human body: could you discover anything more feeble than man, when often even a tiny fly can kill him either by its bite or by creeping into some inward part of him? The only way one man can exercise power over another is over his body and what is inferior to it, his possessions. You cannot impose anything on a free mind, and you cannot move from its state of inner tranquillity a mind at peace with itself and firmly founded on reason. The tyrant Nearchus thought he would be able to torture the philosopher Zeno into betraying his fellow conspirators in a plot against his person, but Zeno bit off his tongue and threw it in the face of the enraged tyrant. Nearchus had thought the tortures an occasion for barbarity, but Zeno made them an opportunity for heroism. There is nothing, in fact, which one man can do to another, which he cannot himself suffer at the hands of someone else. We have the story of how the Egyptian king Busiris used to put strangers to death until he himself was killed by a stranger in the person of Hercules. And in the first Punic War your general Regulus put fetters on many a Carthaginian prisoner of war, but not long afterwards was himself holding out his hands to receive a conqueror's chains. Can you, then, consider it power at all, when a man cannot ensure that someone does not inflict on him what he can inflict on others?

If, furthermore, in these dignities and powers there was some natural and intrinsic good, they would never fall into the hands of evil men, since incompatible things do not usually associate, and nature rejects the combination of opposites. There is no doubt, then, that for the most part it is evil men who hold the offices, and it is therefore clear that these are not intrinsically good, since they admit of being associated with evil men. And the same may be properly concluded in the case of all fortune's gifts, since they fall in greater abundance on all the most wicked people. There is another point to be considered about them. No one doubts that a man in whom he has seen evidence of bravery is brave: a man endowed with speed is manifestly speedy. In the same way music makes a man a musician, medicine makes him a doctor, and rhetoric makes him an orator; for it is the nature of anything to perform the office proper to it. It does not become mixed up in the operations of contrary things and actually repels opposites. But riches are unable to quench insatiable greed; power does not make a man master of himself if he is imprisoned by the indissoluble chains of wicked lusts; and when high office is bestowed on unworthy men, so far from making them worthy, it only betrays them and reveals their unworthiness. The reason for this is that you are accustomed to using the wrong words to refer to things which are by nature otherwise, and are easily proved to be so by their very operation.  So neither riches, power nor high office can properly be called by these words. And lastly we may reach the same conclusion about Fortune as a whole. She has nothing worth pursuing, and no trace of intrinsic good; she never associates with good men and does not turn into good men those with whom she does associate.

'We know the ruin Nero wrought
When Rome was fired and great men killed;
By brother's hand his brother slain,
He dripped with blood from his mother spilled
A practised eye o'er the corpse he rolled
With never a tear to wet his cheek,
Cool connoisseur of beauty cold.
The empire that he held in sway
Extended then from eastern dawn
To where sun sinks at close of day.
Its northern march where the two Bears stand,
Its southern bounds where the parched south wind
Burns and bakes the arid sand.
Could this high power stretched east and west
Check Nero's frenzied lunacy?
Too often Fate, by all abhorred,
To savage poison adds the sword.'

...

Whoever wants to wield high power
Must tame his passions fierce;
His heart to evil must not cower
Or bow to lust's fell yoke.

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I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church, to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.