Boethius

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was born in Rome about the year 480, a few years after the fall of the last Western emperor, into the distinguished Anicii family. Orphaned young after his father Manlius Boethius, consul in 487, died, he was raised by the patrician Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, who formed him in philosophy and letters. Boethius mastered both Latin and Greek—an uncommon gift in the West—and later married Symmachus's daughter Rusticiana; they had two sons, also named Symmachus and Boethius.

Drawn by Plato's ideal of the philosopher in public life, he entered the service of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. He became a senator by about age twenty-five and consul in 510. He investigated fraud in the pay of the royal guard, prepared a water-clock as a royal gift, and secured a lyre-player for King Clovis. In 522 both his sons were named consuls—an extraordinary honor shared with the goodwill of the emperor Justin I—and Boethius himself was raised to magister officiorum, head of the civil administration. He used that office to restrain corrupt officials, protect the poor from plunder, and stop a grain shipment that would have worsened famine in Campania, actions that earned him enemies at court while he still enjoyed the king's favor.

He labored also to heal strained relations between the Roman and Constantinopolitan sees and devoted his scholarship to translating and commenting on Aristotle, Plato, Porphyry, and others, together with works on music, arithmetic, and theology, so that Greek wisdom might serve the Latin Church. In 523, at a royal council in Verona, the referendarius Cyprianus accused the ex-consul Caecina Albinus of treasonous correspondence with Constantinople. Boethius sprang to his defense, declaring that the charge was false, and that if Albinus were guilty then he himself and the whole Senate were equally so. He was then accused on the same grounds, condemned by three witnesses of ill repute, imprisoned first in a church baptistery and afterward at the estate called Ager Calventianus near Pavia, and put to death in 524. Tradition holds that he suffered cruel torment before execution; his father-in-law Symmachus was soon likewise killed and their property confiscated. Boethius's body was laid in the church of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia, where Saint Augustine also rests.

While awaiting death he composed the Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue in which Lady Philosophy leads the prisoner from the false goods of fortune to the true good that is God and His providence. Though the work does not name Christ, the Church has long received Boethius as a faithful Catholic whose learning and martyrdom belong to her patrimony. The local cult of Boethius in the Diocese of Pavia was sanctioned by the Sacred Congregation of Rites in 1883, confirming the custom of honoring him on 23 October.

May Blessed Boethius obtain for us steadfast courage to defend truth and the innocent, and the grace to seek wisdom that leads to God alone.