Consolation in Stitches - Harvard...

Consolation in Stitches*

Austin Lee Campbell / Harvard University

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Philosophy has a fine saying for every thing.—For Death it hasan entire set; the misery was, they all at once rushed into my fa-ther’s head, that ’twas difficult to string them together, so as tomake any thing of a consistent show out of them. . . .

. . . Is it not nonsense to break the thread of such a discourseupon such an occasion? cried my father—do not—dear Toby,continued he, taking him by the hand, do not—do not, I beseechthee, interrupt me at this crisis.1

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Boethius stages hisConsolation of Philosophy as an interruption upon an inter-ruption.Aprisoner toes the threshold of death, exiled by a tyrannical ruler farfromhome and family, cut off in themidst of a successful career, waiting.2 Butnot just waiting: the work begins with him silently composing elegiac versein an attempt at self-consolation, and by all appearances, he is doing a hackjob of it. The figure of Philosophy then storms the scene, looking like a rejectfrom designer JohnGalliano’s couture line of “homeless chic”—draped inma-terial a bit too fine, but no less sullied with a film of long neglect and tattered,she says, at the hands of marauding Stoics and Epicureans, who tore off partsfor themselves and took them for the whole.3 Philosophy banishes the prison-

ssay has benefited at each stage of its development from a host of careful readers.anks are due, most recently, to the journal’s two reviewers and a teaching seminarof Dan McKanan, Catherine Hartmann, Kythe Heller, Cassie Houtz, and Heather-Leader. For an early round of insightful feedback that helped to clarify my argu-ould especially like to thank Mark Jordan, Amy Hollywood, David Lamberth, andtang.

by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.89/2016/9604-0001$10.00

nce Sterne,The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy,Gentleman (New York: Modern Library,5, chap. 3, 367.f nomenclature: since this character is never named in Consolation, I will simply re-as “the prisoner.” And contrary to convention, his instructor has no courtly title likeame. Accordingly, I will just refer to her as Philosophy. To avoid ambiguity, any sen-starts with that word refers to the character.ius, De consolatio philosophiae, 1.3, 142–43. References to the work (henceforth abbre-ons.) will follow the standard convention of book number, then chapter. The poems ared by “m” (formetrum) before the chapter—as 1.m.1. Translations will bemy ownunless

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er’s Muses, theatrical sluts that they are (scenicas meretriculas), because only shecan direct him to his true homeland.

Or so she says. Further interruptions jolt Consolation toward its end. WithPhilosophy at her most complacent, believing that her therapy has nearlycompleted its work upon the prisoner, he rebels. Indeed, starting with thelast chapter in book 3, through the work’s conclusion in book 5, it seemsthat the prisoner governs the direction of their conversation and frustratesPhilosophy’s every attempt to bring him home.

For its dramatization of such interruptions, a coterie of interpreters haveargued that Consolation should be read as a satire. This may come as a sur-prise to people who have only ever lurched through it in a great books sur-vey. Among specialists, however, the point is not entirely novel, at least on aformal level. Mixing genres is a hallmark of the ancient Menippean brandof satire, and given Consolation’s prominent alternation of verse and prose,it is commonly classed as such.4 But the recent claim could surprise even spe-cialists. Anne Payne, inChaucer and Menippean Satire, argues that the Englishpoet’s appropriation of Boethius tracks a spirit of irony that suffuses the ear-lier work. Inspired by her, Joel Relihan claims that the ironies inConsolationgo beyond Menippean polyphony into a full-blown parody of encyclopedicknowledge, all to show the insufficiency of philosophy to console.5 Whereasmedieval readers understood these ironies well, they claim, modern inter-preters have simply missed the joke.6

Some still may not find it funny. After all, why would Boethius have trou-bled himself with constructing Philosophy’s arguments and poems so me-ticulously, under such dire circumstances, if the point were simply to sati-rize and reject them?7

One possible answer, which I will develop in this essay, is that if BoethiuswroteConsolation as a satire, it may not have been to reject consolation as such.Rather, it may have been because something about the satire itself could con-

4 One exception is Howard D. Weinbrot,Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to theEighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 1–19. Weinbrot excludesConsolation because he worries that the simple “mixed form” classification turns Menippean satireinto “the genre that ate the world.”

5 Anne Payne, Chaucer and Menippean Satire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).Joel C. Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) andThe Prisoner’s Philosophy: Life and Death in Boethius’s “Consolation” (Notre Dame, IN: Notre DameUniversity Press, 2007).

6 Relihan, Prisoner’s Philosophy, 97 Such is the position of John Marenbon. He agrees with Relihan that there is a satirical di-

mension toConsolation, since Philosophy’s arguments are inconsistent across the work, but takesthemoremodest position that while Boethius dramatizes their limitations, he does neverthelessendorse them. See JohnMarenbon, Boethius, Great Medieval Thinkers (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2003), 159–63.

noted otherwise. For its accessibility, I use the Loeb Classical Library edition of the Latin text,translated by S. J. Tester, LCL 74 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973). After book andchapter numbers, I include the page numbers of the particular passage in this volume.

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Consolation in Stitches

sole. Relihan also pursues this track. Philosophy’s failed consolation, accord-ing to him, points to Boethius’s Christian faith as the consoling path not taken.On this we differ. Although Relihan develops a subtle case, it ultimately seemsto reduceConsolation to a grandmodus tollens: either philosophy or Christian-ity—not philosophy, so Christianity. One could agree with Relihan, as I do,that Boethius subtly laces Christian themes into the work while nonethelessholding that the ironies involved in the satire would themselves be nontriv-ial elements of its consolation. If we assume that Consolation consoles, or is“supposed” to console, a satirical interpretation should broaden our searchfor its consolation from simply philosophical content, or implied theologicalcontent, to literary form.8 In other words, consolation may lie in the very waysin which the work performs nonconsolation.

The tentativeness of my language reflects the shakiness of this interpre-tive approach. It risks toppling over into indefensible claims about autho-rial intent, as well as equally tenuous speculations about effects that a worklike this would have upon author and readers. My own intent is simply to takeat face value the work’s self-identification as consolation and to explore, inlight of its ironies, what that could mean.

The risk is worthwhile because the stakes run deeper than antiquarian in-terest. What draws me to a satirical interpretation of Boethius is how it couldopen fresh possibilities for thinking about consolation in our own time, some-thing that neither Payne nor Relihan explore. RememberConsolation’s initialimage of Philosophy? A similar but more abject portrait could now be madeof the very idea of consolation. In the name of alternative ideals for how toapproach mortality, a ferment of critical opinion has sought to dismantleit without remainder. Not infrequently, Boethius appears in such critiquesas a metonym for a bygone, now-suspect form of metaphysical consolation.9

By revisitingConsolation with an eye to its ironies, and working through theproblem of how to interpret the work as satire, we can also begin to artic-ulate an approach to consolation as an ethical practice much richer than theflattened target of modern disconsolers—indeed, richer than their own alter-native ideals.

8 This method of reading also informs Steven Blackwood, The “Consolation” of Boethius as Po-etic Liturgy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), although his attention to literary formtakes a very different direction. Blackwood focuses almost exclusively on the poetry, in partic-ular the ways in which Philosophy deploys—and strategically repeats—certain meters with theaim of leading the prisoner to a state of consolation. There will be more to say about Black-wood’s important study below, but for now let me note that my own attention to literary formconcentrates upon the overall narrative, especially the dialogue between the prisoner and Phi-losophy.

9 See esp. Timothy Jackson, Love Disconsoled: Meditations on Christian Charity (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1999), 130–31 and 152. To his credit, Jackson’s target is “Boethian” phi-losophy, whichwemight divorce from the actual text itself. But that he canmake this associationspeaks to a possible misunderstanding of Boethius in philosophical and theological imagina-tion. See also Michel Guerin, Le fardeau du monde: de la consolation (Paris: Encre marine, 2011),29–30.

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Modern Disconsolation and an Interpretive Gambit

To appreciate what that approach involves, it will be helpful to digress fora moment and survey that critical ferment. Amid dismissals of consolation,we can distinguish two main types of views, which, for the allure of sym-metry with Philosophy’s marauders, I am tempted to call stoic and epicu-rean.10 In substance, the symmetry is a bit too ragged for a defensible heu-ristic, but the labels do provide a workable place to begin more appropriatecharacterizations.

Modern disconsolers who tempt the label “stoic” do so by affinity with theancient practice of praemediatio malorum, contemplating bad things that maybefall us before they do. By routinely calling death to mind, the idea goes,you may liberate yourself from fear of it, both in anticipation and in actualapproach. The corresponding ideal of this practice is an attitude of resigna-tion toward the reality of a universe indifferent to our projects, and an ac-ceptance of death. Although ancient Stoics’ notions of consolation usuallyinvolved such acceptance, modern writers in this vein utter “consolation” asa byword for “illusion” or “denial,” a numbing agent that reinforces anyegocentric predisposition we may have to consider ourselves invulnerable,which thereby prevents us from undertaking the grim contemplation nec-essary to arrive at proper acceptance.11 Religious representations of after-life come under particular suspicion, but not uniformly or exclusively. Theissue is with any construct that diverts us from reality and makes us feelmore than mortal—that the losses of death are not, ultimately, losses. Sucha position is not confined to elite groups of intellectuals. Thanks to one par-ticularly influential proponent of this approach, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, adenial-acceptance binary has come to pervade the discourse in clinical spaceswhere many people in Western countries now do their dying. In such spaces—and I vouch for this from my own experience, whatever it may be worth,moonlighting as a hospital chaplain—an attitude of acceptance is often theunquestioned gold standard for a “good death.”12

10 I use lowercase here to maintain a distinction with their historical analogues.11 For most ancient Stoics, consolation would be successful when one had achieved a state

of apatheia, which does not mean “apathy” in our contemporary usage so much as a state ofcalm, untroubled by violent passions. For excellent analyses, see Martha Nussbaum, The Ther-apy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1994), chap. 10, “The Stoics on the Extirpation of the Passions”; Richard Sorabji, Emotion andPeace of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 181–97. The modern writers who artic-ulate an attitudinal ideal of resignation toward and acceptance of mortality are less than clearas to whether this affective state would follow, perhaps in part because they do not situate them-selves dogmatically in the lineage of Stoicism.

12 Elizabeth Kubler-Ross,On Death and Dying (1969; repr., New York: Routledge, 2009), esp. 1–17.See also Camilla Zimmerman, “Denial of Impending Death: A Discourse Analysis of the PalliativeCare Literature,”Social Science and Medicine 59, no. 8 (October 2004): 1769–80; Bethne Hart, PeterSainsbury, and Stephanie Short, “Whose Dying? A Sociological Critique of the ‘Good Death,’”Mor-tality 3, no. 1 (March 1998): 65–77. To be fair to Kubler-Ross, she never attacks “consolation” per se,and her later work actively promotes belief in an afterlife. But important features of her early work

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This view’s affinity with ancient Stoicism could raise suspicions that evenas writers throw one form of consolation out the front door, their ideal of res-ignation and acceptance welcomes another, somewhat disguised, through theback. In its most everyday sense, after all, consolation just means somethinglike “assuagement of sorrow,” however partial. Through that back door maylisp a wintry breeze, damp with residual sadness, but resignation and accep-tance may still diminish the dissonance felt when the inevitability of death col-lides with one’s self-regard. Consolation as illusion diminishes it, roughly speak-ing, by siding with self-regard; consolation as acceptance, with inevitability.

The latter may be even worse than the former, at least according to dis-consolers who tempt the label “epicurean.” The trouble with acceptancemay be that it taints the present with anticipation of future nothingness. Bycontemplating the inevitability of our end, placing ourselves there in imag-ination and picturing the dissipation of our projects, we could acquire a de-spairing sense that the end might as well have happened already.13 In turn,we may disengage somewhat from our projects here and now, or perhapscapitulate before proximate causes of our inevitable end, such as a tyranni-cal regime or treatable disease.14 This position tempts the label for its affin-ity with Epicurus’s claim in his Letter to Menoceus that “death is nothing to us”and should be disregarded: when we are, it is not; when it is, we are not.15

Unlike the previous analogy with ancient Stoicism, the affinity here is quiteloose, for these modern disconsolers also accuse Epicurus of hawking acheap sophism.16 Death might imply nothingness, but it is not for that rea-son nothing to us, a matter of indifference. In fact, they join the modern sto-

13 One celebrant of this type of perspective, Ray Brassier, gives it the rather highfalutinname “anterior posteriority.” See Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Pal-grave Macmillan, 2007).

14 See R. Clifton Spargo,The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature (Bal-timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), which argues that consolation tends to rein-force a status quo. The vigorous engagement of Stoics, ancient and modern, in social affairswould of course complicate these accusations. The connections between the affective impactof their philosophies around resignation and their actual engagements are undoubtedly com-plex and beyond the scope of exploration here.

15 Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus 124–27. Lucretius develops this idea in De rerum natura III.830and surrounding lines.

16 As with the ancient Stoic case, this claim about death’s nothingness to us would actuallyhave been part of a consolatory strategy. For the Epicureans, its success wouldmean the achieve-ment of ataraxia, literally “untroubledness,” which is closely related to apatheia in its sense of tran-quility. Here too, Nussbaum provides illuminating analysis inTherapy of Desire (see chap. 6, “Mor-tal Immortals: Lucretius on Death and the Voice of Nature”). Even more obviously than in the

follows Freud, inflecting “denial” in the same manner that he does “illusion.” And Freud often dis-cusses illusion and consolation in the same breath. See Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion,trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 19–24, 38–41, “Thoughts for the Times onWar and Death,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud(hereafter “Standard Edition”), vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1957–74), 291–300, and Civilizationand Its Discontents, in Standard Edition, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth, 1957–74), 74–85. In thissense, Freud reimagines Marx’s critique of religion as an “opiate of the people,” which the lat-ter introduces in “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” inThe Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 54.

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ics in appreciating how the worm of mortality can eat straight through en-lightened disregard. But feeling its incursion, these writers respond by articu-lating an ideal of revolt or, more modestly, investment in life in the present,an assertion that even in the throes of death, one is still living.17 These dis-consolers are no friends of illusion either, but they make a chastened returnto the self-regard repudiated by proponents of death acceptance.18 To keeponeself invested in a life so frail, only to be stripped by death as an assailant,is for them the ultimate disconsolation.

Any proposal for consolation should respond in some way to these cri-tiques. But where to begin? On the face of things, the two approaches sur-veyed here seem to be at loggerheads. Even as epicurean revolters might im-pugn the stoics for reintroducing something like consolation in their idealof death acceptance, the latter could in turn accuse revolters of second-order denial—a principled denial, but denial all the same—which could itselfreintroduce something like consolation, inasmuch as it turns attention fromthe harsh reality of our inevitable deaths. By presenting this possibility, I donot mean to imply that there is some kind of inevitable human drift towardconsolation, despite all resistance. The point is more basic: despite the agree-ment between these approaches upon a broad attitudinal ideal of disconso-lation, the specific ideals with which they articulate their respective under-standings of disconsolation sit in tension with one another, tension so greatthat each could see in the other a resemblance of their mutual opponent. Andthis presents a basic problem for anyone who might try to develop an accountof consolation that would not fall afoul of their critiques. (The situation callsto mind a haggard graduate student trying to adjudicate savage but conflict-ing comments on a draft chapter by her dissertation committee. Follow one,and the other awaits, cudgel in hand.)

We could simply reject both. Each of these paths in disconsolation workswithin an “immanent frame” characteristic of much modern thought,19 andone could argue that they have unjustifiably given short shrift to the conso-lation somemay find in transcendent points of reference.20 I will not pursue

17 The classic statement of revolt and disconsolation is Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus andOther Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1983). A similar but more ambivalent ap-proach appears in JeanAmery,OnAging: Revolt and Resignation, trans. JohnD. Barlow (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1994). The more modest position of affirmation of life in the presentappears in Paul Ricoeur’s posthumous book Living Up to Death, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2009), a collection of moving, lapidary fragments.

18 Ricoeur especially targets what he calls at several points the “make-believe” that we tell our-selves in face of death. See Living up to Death, 8, 12, 16, 22, 30.

19 I take the term “immanent frame” from Charles Taylor’s discussion in A Secular Age (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), chap. 15.

20 For instance, the Christian ars moriendi tradition, especially in its late medieval and earlymodern exemplars, encourages the dying to focus on the hereafter while also cultivating a sternattitude of resignation and acceptance.

prior case, modern writers who bear a loose affinity with Epicurus nonetheless reject the ancientaffective goal.

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this strategy. Bypassing the thicket of questions about whether and how suchpoints of reference could—or should—be used to console, I wish to adopt animmanentorientation as amethodological starting point, to explorewhetherdisconsolation before mortality really must be understood as one of its con-stitutive features. Another tack would be to try harmonizing the views. Ac-ceptance of death may not have to conflict with an affirmation of life, in-asmuch as death is part of life writ large. And besides, a flyover, ideal-typicalpresentation like the one above loses much important detail. By reconstruct-ing the arguments of particular texts, we may find nontrivial convergencepoints, from which we could develop a response.

But what if Tristam Shandy, quoted in the epigraph, was right? What ifwe can neither harmonize nor satisfactorily decide between the fine thingsphilosophy says about death—or at least the disconsoling views sketchedabove?

As a working hypothesis, I would like to suggest that he was. Those viewseach seem to privilege one of two heterogeneous perspectives that we canand do take on our lives. Proponents of acceptance privilege a perspectivethat we might call “objective” or, less controversially, experience-far. Propo-nents of revolt or affirmation privilege one that wemight call “subjective” orexperience-near. In the experience-far perspective, we think of ourselves asthough from the outside, which lends itself to a cosmic vision that demotesour personal significance, since “I” can be just another fact in the universe,a fleeting member of the class of mortal rational animals. In the experience-near perspective, we focus on our lives as they appear from a first-personalstandpoint, where we are not just another member of a taxonomic class butpassionately invested in particular relationships and projects that make this“I” who she is. Let me emphasize the hypothetical nature of this interpre-tive gambit. Proper development and defense would require an essay of itsown.As ithappens,other suchessayshavebeendone.21While that alonedoesnot establish the position, it does confer just enough prima facie plausibil-ity to justify working from the hypothesis as a hypothesis.

That granted, I want to point out that we cannot adjudicate such perspec-tives in the same way that we would conflicting arguments. We could doubledown on the conflict, argue for the superiority of a particular perspective,and try to structure our thoughts around it. But we could not toss away theother like an outmoded garment. To some extent, both perspectives maybe inexpugnable features of our conscious lives. Because of that, they are

21 See esp. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).He began to work through the position in earlier work, most directly in the essays “Death”and “The Absurd,” collected in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).Camus suggests this position through The Myth of Sisyphus in his concept of the absurd, althoughhe does not use the vocabulary of objective and subjective. In fact, this is a theme that runsthroughout much so-called existentialist thought, worked out in different registers. The par-ticular terminology of experience-near and experience-far is Taylor’s. See A Secular Age, 568.

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in fact minimally unified. But that only makes their heterogeneity morepoignant. As I have suggested above, they lend themselves to conflictingideals for which potentially persuasive reasons are at hand. So if the two ap-proaches to disconsolation do indeed emerge fromheterogeneous perspec-tives, we may require a different, more intricate approach to their conflict.

This is where I turn to Boethius. Instead of rejecting or harmonizing thedisconsoling views, we could rather affirm both together in their incongru-ity, a sort of reconciliation without harmony. As my invocation of TristamShandy already hinted, such an embrace of incongruity is a commonly rec-ognized ingredient of humor, and we will see that play upon this particularincongruity is a crucial feature of Consolation’s satire—as well as what it couldmean for the text successfully to console, even as Philosophy seems to fail.The work dramatizes a form of playful, ironic double-talk that both affirmsand undermines something like each of these perspectives, encouraging aqualified attitude of both acceptance and revolt. Through its enactment ofthis double-talk,Consolation seems to commend such irony as an attitudinalexcellence in face of looming ends, perhaps not appropriate for all peoplein all situations, but certainly a live alternative to the either-or.

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Let us not gallop ahead too quickly, however. Before taking an interest inhow Consolation’s satire could inform a response to modern disconsolers,one may need convincing that the text satirizes Philosophy at all, especiallybecause some of the most recent scholarship on Boethius has, either bytacit implication or by explicit aim, challenged this interpretation.22 Fortu-

22 A tacit challenge appears throughout Blackwood, The “Consolation” of Boethius, inasmuchas he presents a sophisticated argument for thinking that the book’s poetry develops a suc-cessful consolation of the prisoner. For their development of more explicit challenges, a fewworks are particularly notable. The most extensive challenge comes from Anthony Donato,whose Boethius’ “Consolation of Philosophy” as a Product of Late Antiquity (London: Bloomsbury Ac-ademic, 2013) argues that Relihan and others impose anachronistic expectations that philos-ophy, to be successful, should produce entirely coherent arguments, and that while Boethiusdoes suggest that Philosophy can only take the prisoner so far, this would be in keeping with alate ancient synthesis of Christianity and Neoplatonic philosophy. A similar line of argumentappears in Michael Chase, “Time and Eternity from Plotinus and Boethius to Einstein,” RK 8(2014): 67–110. Chase contends that the satirical reading misunderstands the therapeutic roleof philosophy in the context of a Neoplatonic curriculum, which, for long-term pedagogical aims,would move through a variety of philosophical arguments that sit in tension with each other.Philip Edward Phillips, in “Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae and the Lamentatio/Consolatio Tra-dition,” Medieval English Studies 9 (2001): 5–27, argues both that Boethius crafts the book with asteady trajectory from despair to hope and that later readers would not have found it as consolingas they did if it had been a satire. Versions of this argument, without the explicit critique of thesatirical reading, also appear in Phillips, “Lady Philosophy’s Therapeutic Method: The ‘Gentler’and the ‘Stronger’ Remedies in Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae,”Medieval English Studies 9(2002): 5–25, and “Boethius, the Prisoner, andThe Consolation of Philosophy,” in Prison Narrativesfrom Boethius to Zana (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 11–34. I will treat these various ob-jections in the reading that follows.

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nately, we can feed both interpretive and constructive interests throughan intimate consideration of the text itself. To work our way in, I would liketo pose a very basic, almost embarrassingly simpleminded question: Whereis the consolation inConsolation? Where is it performed?

One might be sheepish about asking such a question because the titleseems to provide such an obvious answer. The genitive—Consolation of Philos-ophy—could mean that any consolation performed in the book is performedthrough her character. And in a basic way, the dialogue supports this. Phi-losophy clearly presents herself as a consoler to the despondent prisoner,a physician to a sick patient, and the preponderance of the dialogue’s linescome from her mouth. So, one could justifiably locate Consolation’s conso-lation in her arguments and poems. From them, one might even try to cob-ble together an overall account of evil, death, and how one should comportoneself when confronted by them.

But this will not do. For starters, the titular evidence is inconclusive, be-cause the genitive is ambiguous, as genitives sometimes are. In grammati-cal terms, the first reading interprets it as a subjective genitive. With the titleconsidered by itself, however, the genitive could also be objective. Philos-ophy could be the proposed recipient of consolation, rather than its agent.Granted, what I just mentioned above resists such a proposal. Even so, it ishard to discern which of Philosophy’s arguments or poems should be takenas the primary locus of consolation. Over the course of the work, she actu-ally moves between Platonic, Stoic, Aristotelian, and Augustinian views thatsometimes conflict with each other, as though she has difficulty making upher own mind about where consolation is to be found.23

These difficulties nudge us toward a more nuanced reading of the text’sperformance of consolation. The ancient consolatio genre is a prime exam-ple of what Pierre Hadot calls “spiritual exercises,” an engaged philosophythat seeks to form readers over an itinerary mapped by its arguments, ratherthan simply informing them. Particular arguments or images may drive theoverall performance and thereby present themselves as eligible for treatmentas stand-alone items, the “consolations” of which the performance is com-posed. But to focus on such items in abstraction from the exercises in whichthey appear diminishes our understanding of the sort of work they do.24 Assome critics of a satirical reading point out, ancient philosophical therapywould actually employ arguments that conflict with each other for the sakeof an overall project that does, in the end, cohere.25 A few local conflicts im-ply no outright failure, for any consolation would be found in the cumula-tive effect, rather than isolated features, of Philosophy’s speeches.

23 See Marenbon, Boethius, 146–48; and Payne, Chaucer and Menippean Satire, 17–18.24 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (New York:

Blackwell, 1995), 22–24, 64.25 Chase, “Time and Eternity,” 81–82; and Donato, Boethius’ “Consolation of Philosophy,” 77–78.

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This presents another possibility for locating the consolation in Conso-lation. If it lies in the cumulative effect of a nonsystematic series of argu-ments and poems, we might expect it to be performed most vividly towardthe end. And here too, the dialogue provides ballast. In fact, Philosophyherself encourages readers to expect such a deferral. She notes early on thather poems are only for sweetening the therapy until her grief-stricken pa-tient becomes strong enough to receive stronger medicines, at which pointher intervention would be complete.26 Moreover, the prisoner falls into aconspicuous silence over the final three chapters, allowing Philosophy tospeak unhindered until she triumphantly declares his questions solved. Thedialogue up to then had progressed through a sometimes contentious give-and-take between the characters. When the prisoner falls silent, however,Philosophy subsumes the dialectic into her own speech, anticipating the pris-oner’s objections without letting him even murmur, as though their differ-ences had been overcome, and their voices unified.27 One could picture himnodding to her every word, eyes closed in meditative agreement.

But silence can be as ambiguous as a genitive. It can indicate accord. Itcan also indicate—or conceal, under the guise of accord—exasperation. Whenunaccompanied by gestural clues, as inConsolation, how one understands asilence relies upon preceding speeches and events. And in this case, the textonly complicates matters further. The ending of book 5 actually stages Phi-losophy’s second attempt at concluding the consolation. Her first attemptcame soon after what commentators have long agreed is the climax of thework, the hymn inspired by Plato’s Timaeus at 3.m.9.28 The space betweenthem enacts some of the work’s most important ironies, not just in Philos-ophy’s apparent inability to make up her mind but also in the very contoursof her dialogue with the prisoner. This is especially evident in the transitionsto books 4 and 5, so let us concentrate our attention there.

Consolation Unwound

After the hymn, Philosophy launches a chain of arguments comprising whatshe takes to be the final steps necessary to lead the prisoner to his “true home-

26 Cons. 1.5, 164–65.27 This is the basic position of Terrence Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy (Washington, DC: George-

town University Press, 1991), 150–51, and Rivkah Zim, The Consolations of Writing: Literary Strate-gies of Resistance from Boethius to Primo Levi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 26.

28 In this connection, note that Phillips’s attempt to counter Relihan through an alterna-tive reading of Consolation concentrates upon its first half and, with the exception of a fewcursory nods to the fourth and fifth books, basically stops at this climactic poem. If I am rightthat the satirical elements appear most vividly in the final two books, we may conclude thatwhile Phillips’s work on this topic helps to refine our understanding of Philosophy’s therapy,it ultimately poses no significant challenge to my interpretation. To a lesser extent, Chase alsosuccumbs to this pitfall. He claims (103) that the first half of Consolation serves to restore thenarrator to clarity of vision, with which he can receive a set of coherent arguments presentedin the second.

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land.” She tries to show that happiness amounts to the same thing as good-ness, and that both amount to the same thing as divinity.29 Additionally, sheargues that goodness amounts to unity. The prime example she gives is theunity of soul and body in living creatures, which is good inasmuch as it pre-serves their particular form of life.30 But the value of unity runs much deeper.It informs the very strategy she pursues throughout the work. At bottom,she regards the prisoner’s grief as the noxious exhaust of misguided beliefabout life, death, and value.31 Once our thoughts have the unity of a soundsyllogism, she thinks, we can face the ravages of mortal existence with equa-nimity.

With such importance given to the idea of unity, it turns out that Philos-ophy’s example of creaturely preservation is misleading. It may even be a di-version. For she eventually uses the idea to portray self-preservation as amerely relative good. Preservation, she claims, is a principle of nature, notwill. Nature always seeks to maintain the unity of soul and body, even whenthere might be good reasons for a creature to die. In such circumstances,the will can override nature’s horror and accept death in pursuit of good-ness. And since Philosophy has defined unity as goodness, and goodnessas divinity, accepting death for the sake of goodness would preserve a unityhigher than that of soul and body—unity of the soul and God.32 She rein-forces this suggestion with a clever double entendre: the good is the end ofall things. “End” here carries the sense of telos or goal, clearly, but also “end” inthe sense of death, insofar as death conduces to union with God.33 Put neg-atively, as she does a bit later, no creature can go against God and still pre-serve its nature.34 What it retains in bare life, it loses in goodness.

Her arguments almost crinkle as they unfold, so arid are they, but theirimport for the dramatic context is obvious. The narrative frame ofConsola-tion, in which Philosophy encourages the prisoner to consider himself inrelation to a long line of philosophical martyrs, has already situated himon the threshold of death, awaiting a similar victory of unjust execution(iniustiae victoriam mortis).35 To agree with Philosophy and consummate herconsolation, practically speaking, would be to cross that threshold. Onlythus, it seems, could he reach his true homeland.36 Not that the prisoner

29 Cons. 3.10, 280–81.30 Ibid., 3.11, 288–91.31 Ibid., 2.4, 190–91.32 Ibid., 3.11, 288–97.33 Ibid., 3.11, 296–97. Relihan argues that throughout Consolation, Philosophy appears as a

figure of death. In part, this is because the text seems to reenact Plato’s prison dialogues,where philosophy is defined as a concern with death. See Relihan, Prisoner’s Philosophy, 68–69.

34 Cons. 3.12, 302–3.35 Ibid., 1.3, 142–43.36 This is an important point of difference between my and Relihan’s reading on one hand

and Donato’s on the other. Donato (Boethius’ “Consolation of Philosophy,” 96 n. 80) rejects it fora couple main reasons. First, he sees no indication in Consolation that its author was aware ofimpending execution. Second, it was commonly accepted in Boethius’s Neoplatonic philo-

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would necessarily try to beat the executioner to the punch (or sword, as thecase may be), but he would embrace what was to come, transforming it fromsomething merely suffered to something willed. And he seems prepared todo just that. Along each step of her logical chain, the prisoner admits howtightly bound it is by the soundest reasoning and even claims to have beenmade happy by how her argument distances him from self-preservation.37

But then, emboldened by her success, Philosophy goes a step too far. Shegets the prisoner to agree that God is not just our supreme good, but alsoomnipotent. And since God can do anything, but cannot do evil, she con-cludes that evil must be nothing. We could imagine that she takes this ad-ditional step to further loosen the prisoner’s hold on self-preservation. Theformer step raised his vision heavenward to contemplate the goodness deathcould secure. This one would encourage the same direction of vision butnegatively, having him disregard the proximate causes of death.

It has the opposite effect. Upon hearing Philosophy’s declaration, the pris-oner immediately rouses as though from the brink of sleep, and in a fight-ing mood: “You’re playing with me, aren’t you (ludisne me), weaving an in-escapable labyrinth with your arguments, since at one moment you enterwhere you’ll come out, and at another, you come out where you entered?”38

A startling shift of tone: just a few lines before, but really through most ofPhilosophy’s speeches hitherto, the prisoner was the picture of complai-sance. Now, it looks like what she had so carefully woven threatens to fray.

Note the prisoner’s diction. Dense as Consolation is with classical allusions,the invocation of a labyrinth is particularly significant. In Ovid’s telling, theLabyrinth was built by King Minos of Crete to house the Minotaur, the half-breed progeny of a love affair between Pasiphae, his wife, and a bull sentby Poseidon for a sacrifice that Minos refused.39 Catullus notes that anyoneunfortunate enough to be sent into the Labyrinth would be summarily de-

37 Cons. 3.12, 302–3.38 Ibid., 3.12, 304–5.39 Ovid, Heroides 1.4. See also Hermann Kern,Through the Labyrinth, trans. Abigail H. Clay,

with Sandra Burns Thomson and Kathrin A. Velder (New York: Prestel, 2000), chap. 1.

sophical milieu that a human soul may ascend to a higher realm of reality (i.e., the “truehomeland”) without death. Neither reason strikes me as decisive. Irrespective of the broaderNeoplatonic milieu, this particular moment in book 3 does seem to conflate death and theunity of soul with God. Even more important is Philosophy’s survey at 1.3 of the prisoner’sforbears in suffering for their devotion to her. This survey stops at Roman-era philosophicalmartyrs like Seneca, skipping over the Neoplatonists entirely. Along the way, Philosophy men-tions not only their sufferings but also their sufferings’ culmination in execution. Indeed,Socrates enjoys the pride of place in this survey, with his imprisonment and poisoning beingmentioned twice. This consolatory strategy only makes sense if the prisoner could identifywith the figures named, which, practically speaking, would mean that he considered his im-prisonment a likely prelude to death. Relihan himself responds to Donato on these points inhis review of Boethius’ “Consolation of Philosophy” as a Product of Late Antiquity, which appears in BrynMawr Classical Review (2014), http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2014/2014-06-20.html. Relihan usefullypoints out Donato’s tin ear for Consolation’s resonances with Crito—and, I would add, Phaedo.Because Donato rejects the association of Philosophy with death, his reading of books 4 and5 plays down their tensions considerably.

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voured.40 With that in mind, the prisoner’s accusation perhaps calls Philos-ophy’s game for what it has been all along, a stepwise persuasion into death.Or perhaps he identifies himself with the Minotaur, a creature afflicted by adouble nature. Either way, his word choice conjures associations with a trapexternal to himself—or better, another prison—something he would haveto be lured into. Were consolation truly to take, however, her unified argu-ments would need to become part of the prisoner’s own mental life. Worsestill, the idea of playing harkens back to the first book, where Philosophypromised to take the prisoner to a high citadel, from which they would laughdown(desuper inridemus) at the folly of evildoers whose violence affects onlythe most worthless, fleeting parts of mortal life.41 By accusing Philosophyof playing with him, the prisoner may be suggesting that he remains trappedon the ground below, lumped into the calamitous objects of philosophi-cal derision. From that vantage point, evil is far from nothing.

Philosophy tries to backpedal, saying with appropriate gravitas that “we’renot at all playing” (minime ludimus).42 Given that her consolation would cul-minate in his acceptance of death, we can take her at her word. But in hermyopic concentration upon the task, she fails to consider an important pos-sibility: the prisoner may be playing with her.

Whereas book 1 began with Philosophy interrupting the prisoner and di-recting him along her own path of consolation, the last two books start withthe prisoner interrupting her. In book 4, the prisoner narrates that despitethe dignity and gravity of Philosophy’s expression, he still “had not forgottenhis grief ” and so cuts her off just as she was preparing to say something else.(We are left to wonder what that might have been.) The reason he cites forgrief, interestingly, is not his imminent death. Rather, he complains to Phi-losophy that despite God’s governance, evil goes unpunished, and while itflourishes, virtue is trodden underfoot. His own imminent death is certainlya case of this. But the complaint, in form at least, pertains to the apparentdisorder in God’s governance that would make this possible.43

To this, Philosophy basically rehearses her initial promise to drive awaydisquiet and help him return safely to his homeland. And the prisoner goadsher on: “Not that I don’t think you can do it. . .”44 Her strategy, in large part,is to deflate his claim by showing that good never goes unrewarded, andwickedness never unpunished, because each contains its own dessert. To stopthe wicked would relieve them of great misfortune. If they did not die likeeveryone else, Philosophy would actually number them among themost un-fortunate.45

40 Catullus, Carmina 64.41 Cons. 1.3, 142.42 Ibid., 3.12, 304.43 Ibid., 4.1, 312–13.44 Ibid., 4.2. Here I quote from the translation of Victor Watts, rev. ed. (London: Penguin,

1999), 87.45 Cons. 4.3–4, 330–41.

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The prisoner does not seem impressed. In fact, he responds to her ar-gument with a joke: “I agree, but I vehemently hope for their quick releasefrom the misfortune of being able to do evil.”46 The form of this joke—“yes,but. . .”—sets up a pattern that the prisoner uses three more times in thisbook.47 For instance, in her discussion of providence and fate, she leadshim to the conclusion that since all fortune is either a reward for the goodor punishment for the wicked, all fortune is good. The prisoner concedes, butnonetheless claims that it must be classed among her other inopinable—that is, paradoxical or absurd (inopinabiles)—opinions.48 Yes, the argumentsare logically cohesive and difficult to resist on their own terms, but they situncomfortably with ordinary human experience. Observe that he does notsimply dismiss her arguments. The trouble actually arises because he acceptsthem, or at least claims to. They simply cannot be made to cohere with lifeas lived.All fortunemaybe good, philosophically speaking.But tohumanbe-ings living through wild vicissitudes of fortune, that seems crazy. Everydayspeech recognizes that there is good fortune and there is bad fortune.

Book 5 opens with Philosophy silent, drawing a breath before movingonto “certain other topics,” when the prisoner cuts in with another question.He wants to test the issue of providence by asking whether there is such thingas chance. Philosophy deigns to follow his lead again, but before answering,she observes that the question digresses from “our” (read: her) proposed pathback to the prisoner’s true home. Perhaps she had been hoping throughbook 4 that the prisoner’s resistance was something other than a digres-sion, and only now recognizes what is afoot. Whatever the case, she worriesthat all these digressions will leave him too weary to complete the journey.

Again, he follows with an ironic statement: “There’s absolutely nothingto worry about. To recognize the things I delight in most will be like a rest-ing place for me. . . .Nothing about what comes next needs to be in doubt.”49

The irony lies in a bit of double-talk. To mollify Philosophy’s concern abouthis inability to complete the journey, he actually admits to stopping themmidway through. A conceited teacher could hear references to her ownideas in his mention of the “things I delight in most.” But he may just as wellbe referring to the things of mortal existence, things that can stay in viewonly so long as Philosophy’s consolation remains incomplete. It cannot bedeferred indefinitely, insofar as “what comes next” is the prisoner’s death.And if the “yes, but” pattern of book 4 is any indication, he accepts this re-ality. Still, the deferral may reaffirm his investment in the ground-level mat-ters of everyday existence, from which Philosophy’s consolation is trying tolead him away.

46 Ibid., 4.4, 340–41.47 At Cons. 4.4, 4.5, and 4.7.48 Ibid., 4.7, 376.49 Ibid., 5.1, 384–87.

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The practical interest driving his ostensibly speculative question suggestsas much. As they pursue it, they eventually come to the question of whetherthe perfect divine foreknowledge behind providence leaves any possibilityof human freedom, and with the indeterminacy involved in freedom, thepossibility of efficacious prayer.50 Without some such connection with thedivine and some possibility of spontaneous and efficacious action, the pris-oner supposes that the human race would necessarily grow weak (fatiscere).51

This is the exhaustion that concerns him, not one that would hinder hisjourney’s completion. In fact, he seems to flip Philosophy’s concern here.For insofar as this exhaustion would drain mortal existence of efficacy, itmay actually rush the journey to premature completion.

Another ironic reversal happens here on the level of gross structure. Whenthe prisoner lays out the problem of foreknowledge and freedom in 5.3,lamenting the absurd enmity that he perceives between these two truthsand the disruption it effects in human affairs, he makes a speech that is,by sheer duration, rivaled only by one he gives in the first book.52 Moreover,he had spoken not a single poem since the conclusion of that earlier se-quence. Yet at the end of 5.3, he speaks in verse again, even using the samemeter as 1.m.5.53 These formal features are not all they have in common. Inthe earlier speech, he responds to Philosophy’s request for him to reveal hiswound, and as he narrates his personal travails, he raises the same concernsthat we see in books 4 and 5. The wicked prosper while the good wither.And because of that, he has no freedom to hope for. These resonances sug-gest that in the latter parts of Consolation, when we might have expected Phi-losophy’s consolation to have done its work, the dialogue returns thematicallyto the beginning. One salient difference between the two speeches is that theprisoner’s noisy lamentation seems to havematured into a pointed philosoph-ical objection, no longer against the incongruities of his own life so muchas the incongruity that plagues all human lives. The prisoner may have re-called his former training through Philosophy’s therapy, but instead of con-solation, that just gives him a more refined vocabulary with which to lodgehis complaint.54

50 Ibid., 5.3, 400–401.51 Ibid., 5.3, 402–3. It is worth noting that another meaning of this verb is “to crack open”

or “part asunder.” While this does not seem to be the sense in use here, the semantic reso-nance nonetheless seems important.

52 Cons. 1.4–1.m.5, 146–61.53 It is anapestic dimeter. Blackwood discusses this on 119–23 and 205–9 of The “Consolation”

of Boethius.54 Blackwood, ibid., notes that Philosophy’s poem at 4.m.6 is also in anapestic dimeter, and

just as the prisoner concludes his complaint in 5.3, before beginning his own anapestic dimeter,he paraphrases lines 41–43 of that earlier poem. Blackwood sees in this rhythmic and thematicecho an indication that Philosophy’s therapy is taking hold in the prisoner. But we could readthis as another formal irony. The prisoner may be capable of miming her words and sounds,but incapable of fully assenting to her argument. His poem, after all, mainly develops a seriesof questions. If we think of this as an echo, it might not be call and response so much as a pingoff a recalcitrant surface. Indeed, Blackwood himself notes that Philosophy’s poem at 5.m.2

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This particular reversal implies a basic chiastic structure. The grief-strickenprisoner walks up to the point of being consoled in book 3 but then grad-ually walks back, recalling from his teacher a way of thinking that, in hu-man hands, leads to absurdity. It is actually a trope of Menippean satire (es-pecially in Lucian) for a protagonist to descend to the realm of the dead andreturn, using the journey as a lesson for readers. Insofar as Philosophy’s con-solation would culminate in the prisoner’s death, a similar paradigm mightbe at work here with an added twist. The prisoner’s journey to the world ofthe dead in Consolation would not be descent, but contemplative ascent. Al-though tempted toward the heights, in the end he remembers his footing.

But again, this is no duplication of the beginning. Changes happen withPhilosophy as well. Early in the dialogue, she exhibits dauntless confidencein her ability to bring the prisoner around to a proper way of thinking abouthis looming death. But in 4.6, she expresses doubt that the prisoner couldever understand her portrayals of Providence, saying that everything seemsconfused because humans are in no position to contemplate the divine or-der of things. She expresses a similar view in 5.4, where she simply appealsto the inscrutability of God to weak human reasoning. She does eventuallyseize control over the dialogue and keeps the prisoner from speaking throughthe last three chapters. This could express her confidentmastery of the ques-tions. Or it could express effusive desperation. In fact, the final chapterhas her concede the prisoner’s point that a certain necessity follows fromGod’s foreknowledge, since something foreknown cannot but happen.Granted, she concedes it as through gritted teeth, and with a jab: “I will in-deed confess that it’s a matter of the firmest, unbroken truth (solidissimae ve-ritatis), butone towhichhardly anyonebutanexaminerof thedivine(speculatordivini)wouldhave comenear.”55And shedoes get the last word: “Agreat neces-sity, if you don’t want to deceive yourself, is appointed for you, a necessityof uprightness, since you act before the eyes of an all-seeing judge.”56 Butby then, shehas effectively adopted theprisoner’s terms.Her concession takesthe form of the prisoner’s “yes, but.” And the last word claims that the pris-oner’s concern should not be metaphysical necessity, but moral—whichreinscribes the prisoner’s concerns with the business of living, not with hisconsoling death.

Summary without Conclusion

This is the background of the prisoner’s silence. From what we have con-sidered here, it is hard to say decisively what it means. And that is just the

55 Cons. 5.6, 428.56 Ibid., 5.6, 434.

starts by quoting Homer, in Greek, only to critique him as the poem unfolds. It seems possiblethat just as 5.m.3 echoes Philosophy in rhythm, it also echoes her in critiquing the figure citedat its head.

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point. We started by asking where Consolation performs consolation, andin all the places we would have thought to look, especially his final silence,the consolation is uncertain at best.

One possible wrinkle in this reading is not the prisoner’s silence, butPhilosophy’s. The final chapter lacks a poem that, in keeping with the work’sprevailing pattern, should have come from her. With only one exception,1.m.3, the poems are pronounced by the character who last spoke in thepreceding prose section. (Consolation opens in verse, so book 1 follows aunique pattern of verse-prose. Each subsequent book is prose-verse. Evenin book 1, however, there is consistency of voice in transitions from verseto prose.) The wrinkle is that all along, the verses were a concession to theprisoner’s temporary need for sweetened therapy. Philosophy presentedherself as an unwilling—if capable—versifier, only biding her time beforeadministering stronger medicines.57 The conspicuous lack of a final poemmay signal that those medicines have come at last, and with them, the pris-oner’s consolation.58 In fact, the poem she utters at 5.m.5, just before thefinal prose section, may formally broadcast their arrival. Whereas every otherpoem in the book follows just one meter, her ostensibly premature final poemcontains in every line “at least one substantial metric segment of every line ofevery other poem of the Consolation; and so each line is a metric anthologyof all the other lines.”59 This sweeping repetition may constituteConsolation’spoetic closure, signaling that neither the prisoner nor the work itself havefurther need of any sweet concessions.60

But this wrinkle is not too stubborn. Again, the prisoner’s interventionslead Philosophy far afield; they never reach his “true homeland” where hecould not only be safe from the incursions of evildoers but also understandthe providential order of things that made his terrible situation possible.He leads them away from the brink by interrupting Philosophy’s own tra-jectory, while also keeping her talking—an interruption that forestalls his

57 Ibid., 1.5, 164–65.58 This reading goes somewhat against the grain of some work on Consolation. Seth Lerer in

Boethius and Dialogue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 233–36, suggests thatin the absence of a final poem we are to infer the prisoner’s silent prayer, which wouldamount to a refined version of the silence with which the work began. Relihan basically fol-lows Lerer in this reading.

59 Blackwood, The “Consolation” of Boethius, 219.60 For more on poetic closure, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s classic study, Poetic Closure: A

Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Blackwood, The “Conso-lation” of Boethius, 219, takes the point even further. He claims that by drawing all the work’smetrical elements into one synoptic vision, the poem “mediates a kind of temporal escapefrom time, as this comprehensive repetition becomes a temporal enactment of God’s eternalpresent.” The point is significant, because the idea of God’s eternal present is the centerpieceof Philosophy’s attempted resolution to the problem of foreknowledge and freedom. Thepoem would then serve as a model for the prisoner to grasp such an idea. Blackwood’s inter-pretation is compelling by the sheer force of its beauty. Even if correct, however, it does notnecessarily follow that the poem, in its dramatic context, has an effect on the prisoner.

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ultimate interruption.61 And he does this by juxtaposing her detached, ra-tional view of the situation from on high with a partisanship of the ground-level appearances. The ironic double-talk and reversals dramatized here in-sist on the dissonance between them. The prisoner seems to hope for somekind of resolution of that dissonance, but he will settle for no abstract schemaof the situation, however much he concedes the truth of Philosophy’s state-ments. Against this backdrop, two of my earlier suggestions about her engage-ment with the prisoner in the latter half of Consolation could also accountfor the last poem’s metrical hodgepodge. Far from formal closure, it may firstof all enact the literal fraying of her previously even-spun attempts at conso-lation. Recognizing that she has been diverted by the prisoner and that hertherapies havenothad the effect she anticipated, second, shemaybe engagingin one last attempt from desperation, cycling back through her every resourceto see whether something—anything—might take.

These considerations alone do not establish that Consolation is a thorough-going satire. But attending to the seams of the dialogue, marked as they areby salient ironies, does strongly suggest that despite the prisoner’s eventualreduction to silence,Consolation allows Philosophy to speak with such vigorand at such length only to show her own limitations.62

This actually suggests an alternative understanding of her final silence.Recall that the work begins with the prisoner attempting to console himself,alone, through elegiac verse. If part of the irony enacted in Consolation isa chiastic structure that returns to an altered version of the beginning,we might see the final lines as her own version of self-consolation—throughwhich she assures herself, in the prose style she prefers, that the problemhas been solved. In principle, the speech is for the prisoner. But by the end,she may realize that her approach to the issue has failed to do appreciablework on him. In the prisoner’s silence, she effectively stands alone. So with-out his interruptions to hinder her, and without a need to sweeten the dis-course for his benefit, she can ensure that, in the end, there is at least someconsolation of Philosophy.

Despite her self-satisfaction, however,Consolation’s lack of a final poemmakes the work itself feel incomplete on a formal level, like a symphonyending on an unresolved dominant chord, letting dissonance resound un-

61 According to Dustin Griffin, satire tends to be an open, playful form that has difficultyarriving at a stable conclusion. See Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington,KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 95–96, 113, 186.

62 Donato (Boethius’ “Consolation of Philosophy,” 189–91) actually concedes this point to Maren-bon and Relihan, with qualifications. To show Philosophy’s limits, he claims, would not neces-sarily imply that she has failed. Rather, her limits may indirectly point to a higher form of knowl-edge in Christian revelation. Be that as it may, Donato gets to this conclusion in part by respondingto what he takes to be the nub of the satirical reading—namely, the accusation of Philosophy’sargumentative inconsistency. (This particularly happens at 84–92.) As I have tried to make clear,however, if any consideration is decisive, it would be nothing as simple as her inconsistency, butrather the form and trajectory of the dialogue more broadly.

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til the strings quiver their last. Some interpreters have concluded that Boe-thius must have left the work unfinished, perhaps having dropped his penat the executioner’s call. That view seems stretched. It simply presupposesthat if Consolation were truly a consolation, it would have to depict the pris-oner coming decisively under Philosophy’s sway.63 Never mind the compo-sitional cues, slight but discernible, that do signal the work’s end.64 The for-mal gesture of excluding a final poem reinforces an incompletion that seemsto remain in Philosophy’s therapy as a whole, leaving our initial question—Where is the consolation inConsolation?—without a clear answer.

I I I

But Philosophy’s frustration need not imply our own. We can press forwardby simply changing the question. Instead of “Where is the consolation in Con-solation?” we could ask, “How might Consolation console?” It is a different sortof question, but one that continues the process of refinement in our searchthat I encouraged in the previous section, a process of ever greater attentionto textual form. Even if consolation seems to be missing from the drama ofthe dialogue, we can still ask whether consolation might emerge from thesedramatized frustrations, in the space between readers and the work taken asa whole.65

This approach obviously trades one set of difficulties for another. In sur-mising how Consolation might console, an additional question arises: Con-sole whom? And here too, the text resists simple answers. Many other an-cient consolations indicate an addressee, but not this one. The only clearcandidate is Boethius himself. It is hard to avoid identifying him with Con-solation’s unnamed prisoner, and although any literary critic worth her saltrecoils at the thought of conflating a work’s narrator with its author, we

63 This is roughly the view of Chase, “Time and Eternity,” 82. Along with this stretched read-ing of the conclusion, Chase presents a gross mischaracterization of Marenbon’s andRelihan’s satirical interpretations, claiming that they treat Consolation as a “conglomerationof unconvincing arguments thrown together any old way” (103). To the contrary, reading Con-solation as a satire involves treating it as a work of the utmost compositional care and virtuosity.

64 Philosophy’s final statement about the great moral necessity of acting before an all-seeingjudge has the feel of an envoi. Adding to this, the verbs in her final two sentences addressingthe prisoner shift suddenly from second-person singular to second-person plural. This has thefeel of a character stepping out from the main dialogue and addressing the audience alongwith her interlocutor, as though delivering a moral of the story.

65 Indeed, we might consider the overhasty conflation of satire with an outright rejection ofconsolation to be one important—if usually unnamed—source of resistance to a satirical in-terpretation of Boethius. Phillips, for example, appeals to the work’s ongoing popularity asevidence of its power to console in “Boethius, the Prisoner,” 27–28. That people have foundit consoling, however, says little about how. In this connection, I do not mean to suggest (asRelihan does, at least for some of Boethius’s medieval readers) that any consolation peoplehave found has been rooted in comprehension of its satire. But I do mean to suggest that thisis one crucial way of finding consolation through Boethius’s masterwork—in fact, the way mostrooted in its peculiar textual form.

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should not let good interpretive habits induce forgetfulness about the cir-cumstances under which he wrote. Those habits will not lead us astray here,however. Even if the prisoner is a figure of Boethius, so is, to some extent,Philosophy. Early on, the prisoner notes that God has sown her into theminds of the wise, and at times she voices positions that Boethius endorsesin other writings.66 This may be a clue to suggest that, notwithstanding herpersonification as an independent character, the entirety of Consolation mayrepresent an inner dialogue of sorts. But that does not exhaust the question.For Consolation exhibits a care in its construction that one would expect in awork meant to be read widely. It is no prison wall scribble, not even a privatediary like Marcus Aurelius’sMeditations. Furthermore, the text itself embracesa field of concern much wider than this particular prisoner. He presents hisgrief as something that could befall any reflective person, for it arises, at bot-tom, from a conflict between his expectations about good order in the worldand the reality that clamps them between reddened teeth. That is not to saythat any reflective person should findConsolation consoling. Particularities ofcircumstance matter, and there is no accounting for taste. But the work doesseem to open itself as an invitation to all comers, if not for direct consola-tion, perhaps guidance toward self-consolation when we find ourselves toe-ing a similar threshold.

What would it mean to read the work as such an invitation, to find conso-lation in its dramatized frustrations of consolation? Based on my readingabove, it would have something to do with an ironic juxtaposition of theperspectives represented in Consolation’s two characters—or two personaeof one character—perspectives that resemble those first introduced in mysurvey of modern disconsolation.

Now, it is not a perfect resemblance. An experience-far perspective isconstituted in part by how one imagines the world as it stands beyond one-self, and that varies across milieux. The figure of Philosophy generally rep-resents such a perspective, but the maneuvers through which she tries tobring the prisoner to an attitude of acceptance are hardly identical to thoseof modern disconsolers. Something similar could be said of the experience-near perspective. The prisoner is certainly a partisan for it, but the objectionsdriving his partisanship are not the only way to affirm the grain of experi-ence. Where an affinity holds, however, is in their basic form. Philosophywould lead the prisoner to acceptance by loosening his investment in the ap-pearance of things, a form of consolation that, even in this premodern ex-ample, does carry an element of at least short-term disconsolation, inasmuchas the prisoner might have found some solace in proximate goods of mortallife that remained for him. And the prisoner rebels by not simply insistingon appearances, but on the irresolvable dissonance that shakes him whenhearing Philosophy’s arguments alongside them. Any consolation, for him,

66 Cons. 1.3, 10.

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must encompass the full scope of mortal life. This insistence, which exhib-its his abiding investment in an ostensibly capricious world, also producesdisconsolation.

These two perspectives may not easily cohere, if at all, but their ironic jux-taposition in Consolation seems to produce something that transcends thedissonance. Just before the prisoner begins to rebel, Philosophy actuallynods to such a possibility, although this may not be quite what she meant:“Wouldn’t you like for us to clash together our arguments? Perhaps somenoble (pulchra) spark of truth might burst from a collision of this sort.”67

The spark here that should kindle our interest is what I have called a rec-onciliation without harmony. This happens, in a minimal sense, throughthe sheer artistry of the work itself. Notwithstanding the conflict it drama-tizes, Boethius weaves these perspectives together in such a way that theycompose an integral whole larger than themselves. In it, each perspective re-ceives affirmation and, with the affirmation of the other, chastening. The ob-ject ofConsolation’s satire, such as it is, may not be Philosophy so much asphilosophical one-sidedness.

This artistry intimates an even deeper sense of possible reconciliation—beyond the work, in its readers. If we are to suppose that these perspectivescoexist within the same character, and so also within ourselves, we mightsuppose that by ironic juxtaposition we too may achieve a sort of attitudi-nal integrity in face of a looming end. In the general run of everyday life,the heterogeneity of these perspectives may produce few if any feelings ofconflict. However, when the possibility of our death comes into view, plac-ing us at our literal extremity in imagination if not also actuality, that latentperspectival tension may, as we try to discern how we ought to comport our-selves, emerge with force sufficient to rend. Privileging one perspective andits associated ideals may leave us feeling torn from a range of things, associ-ated with the other, that we also value. Disconsolation, in other words, maybe more psychologically complex than simply a negative emotion generatedby misfortune. Taking cues from Boethius, we may also understand it as aform of self-alienation that emerges when attempts to reconcile ourselves tomisfortune suffer from perspectival imbalance. The ironic juxtapositionmodeled inConsolation suggests one way of finding reconciliation with our-selves—integrity in the basic sense of parts holding together—whether ornot we find reconciliation with our fate.

This does not mean we should hold classes in Menippean compositionat the local hospice, tempting as it may be for unemployed classicists. If wetakeConsolation as a guide, it may simply point to the everyday artistry of hu-mor. According to one prominent theory, what makes for humor is preciselythe sort of incongruity that animates Consolation. For instance, Kant arguesthat behind laughter is a perception of something absurd, such as when “a

67 Ibid., 3.12, 302.

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tense expectation is transformed into nothing” with the punch line of ajoke—or perhaps, in this case, the ironizing of expectations about conso-lation. Drawing upon an older sense of humor, he suggests that we valuethis because it “produces in the body an equilibrium of vital forces.”68 Evenmore helpful is Schopenhauer’s refinement of the idea from incongruitybetween expectation and experience to incongruity between perceptionsand abstract, rational knowledge. In this account, humor consists in per-ceiving the absurdity produced when we try to class diverse phenomena un-der the same concept.69Consolation’s prisoner plays upon such incongru-ity in the joke I highlighted above, where he turns Philosophy’s remarksabout the pity due the wicked for their misfortune into a wish for themto be stopped, a joke whose form epitomizes the prisoner’s resistance writlarge. Granted, Boethius does not write with the knee-slapping humor thatpours from other Menippean satirists like, say, Rabelais. In that sense, thetitle of this essay could mislead. If humor is at work in Consolation, it is amuted sort, less in the manner of a laugh than a knowing smile.70 In themore literal sense of my title, this humor consists in graciously, subtly draw-ing together heterogeneous aspects of ourselves that, under the pressure oflooming ends and the question of how we should posture ourselves, threatento come asunder.

How this juxtaposition could console is not immediately obvious. Incon-gruity is also a crucial element of tragedy, and encountering it may well crum-ple us in anguish.71 Even if it elicits a smile, one could imagine being at thesame time despondent inside. One common way of accounting for conso-lation in humor is to show how it induces a feeling of transcendence overincongruous circumstances, in which we look upon them as an adult wouldlook upon the concerns of a child. From that new vantage, occasions of an-guish—even in the face of death—can transform into occasions for plea-sure. This could be chalked up to a noble and useful psychological trick weplay on ourselves, as Freud suggests in his little essay on the subject.72 Orone might use those mental dynamics as a starting place for a full-throatedtheological account of humor, in which the consolation we derive from that

68 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, pt. I, sec. 54, Ak. 332–33. I am using the translationby Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 203.

69 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, bk. 1, sec. 13.70 To this effect, Payne cites Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “reduced laughter” to characterize

the humor in Consolation (Chaucer and Menippean Satire, 83). On the preferability of the smile tothe laugh in consoling humor, see Simon Critchley, On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002),107–9.

71 See John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 12–13.

72 Sigmund Freud, “Humor,” in Standard Edition, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth, 1957–74), 161–66. His most prominent example, in fact, is a joke made by a prisoner en route to the gallows. In-terestingly, he published this essay in the same year as Future of an Illusion (1927), where he comesdown hard against consolation.

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minor form of transcendence glimpses the redemption promised in a worldto come.73

Illuminating though this approach may be, we already encountered aform of it in Philosophy’s own strategy for consoling the prisoner, regis-tered in her promise to lead him to a high citadel from which they couldlaugh down at the folly of mortal existence.74 Perhaps Philosophy failed be-cause the path was all too serious. But probably not. Even though some con-solation may be found in humor as transcendence, the prisoner waves awayany gesture that would remove him from absurdity by slackening the per-spectival tension. Of course, one might nevertheless find a consolation oftranscendence in encountering a text like Consolation. Readers literally dolook down upon it as a completed whole larger than the partial concernsofits characters. But if we take its performance of nonconsolation as a guide,the consolation we seek should actually resist an impulse toward transcen-dence—or include transcendence only as a means of reengaging with theconcerns of mortal life, as in the case of prayer.75 In that case, though, wemight as well withhold the term, fraught as it is with metaphorical associ-ations of vertical space, and simply speak instead of transformation.

That could have the beneficial effect of pressing us toward greater refine-ment in an account of the consolation on offer in a work likeConsolation. Forone could still ask what it is about humor that creates a feeling of transfor-mation in occasions for anguish, and why that might console. I propose thatwe follow another suggestion within the text, as well as other humor theo-rists, and look to the more basic activity of play.76

One approach to play, developed by the psychotherapist Donald Win-nicott in an important book on the subject, is to think of it as a strategy inhuman adjustment to reality, for children and adults alike, that manifestsitself in phenomena from high art to conversational jest.77 On Winnicott’saccount, play creates a transitional space between one’s subjective psychiclife and objective external reality, a space where genuine contact betweenthe two may be formed.78 This is no mean feat, because such contact canbring us to accept and tolerate the irresolvable paradox that they consti-tute.79 In fact, he claims that a patient needs to recover an ability to play

73 Peter Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (New York: deGruyter, 1997), chap. 14, “The Comic as a Signal of Transcendence.”

74 Cons. 1.3, 142–45.75 Ibid., 5.3, 400–401.76 Morreall, Comic Relief, 33–39. The textual suggestion of play comes not just in the prison-

er’s stated resistance to Philosophy at 3.9 and the ensuing ironies. Recall that when Philoso-phy banishes the Muses initially, she calls them “theatrical sluts” (scenicas meretriculas). Perhapspart of her problem is with the very idea of the playful and the performative, reinforced byher denial that her arguments involve play of any sort.

77 D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), 4078 Ibid., 47, 50–51.79 Ibid., 53.

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before therapeutic work can begin.80 Building upon Winnicott’s work, es-pecially his observation that play must involve concrete actions, the anthro-pologist Michael Jackson argues that there are deep affinities between every-day play and ritual. The point of each is not necessarily to change externalrealities, he says, for they often cannot be changed. Instead, their pointis to change us, how we experience our relationship to stubborn, even de-structive, realities. When the possibility of efficacious action becomes closedoff in one domain, play and ritual help us to recover a sense of agency throughvicarious action in another. That recovered sense of agency may so disposeus that we actually do effect some change in stubborn realities, and even ifnot, we may find resources needed to endure.81 In other words, because playinvolves some temporary departure from a standard state of affairs, it mayhave the appearance of blithe detachment, but in actuality, it serves to deepenour engagement with that state of affairs through indirect channels. It is notso much another, higher reality as an altered way of being within—and see-ing—the given.

How this connects with Consolation may be obvious, but let me make itexplicit. I suggested above that although the prisoner introduces the ideaof play with a negative inflection, wringing his hands at the possibility thatPhilosophy may be playing with him, the ironies that imbue the rest of thedialogue themselves create an atmosphere of serious play. The prisoner’sinterruptions hinder the dialogue’s closure, and by keeping it open, he movesPhilosophy toward affirming his own central concerns—namely, a sense ofpractical efficacy amid an ostensibly disordered world. And in the work’slack of formal closure, we might even have an invitation for readers to keepthe dialogue (including its spirit of play) open within themselves, to see thework of consolation as ongoing, unfinished. That point, I admit, may bestretched. But it is not a stretch to suppose that writing a satirical work likethis could have served as a transitional space for Boethius, helping him torecover his ability to play as he stared down a foreshortened future, the ab-surdities of which he transformed into material that could serve the prac-tical interests of living up to death.82 As it happens, one influential theoryof satire hypothesizes that the genre first emerged as a ritual speech-act.83

Whether or not this holds up as a genealogical claim, Consolation may wellhave done the sort of ritual work that Jackson discusses. And it may still. AsI argued above, Consolation presents itself as an invitation open to all com-ers. It may complicate the possibility of straightforward consolation in faceof our deaths, but in doing so, it may guide us toward a spirit of play upon

80 Ibid., 38.81 See, e.g., Michael Jackson, Existential Anthropology (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 81–82, 85.82 Zim argues that for many writers, focusing on the aims of life proves to be the best de-

fense against incursions of death. See Consolations of Writing, 30683 Ralph C. Elliott,The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1960), 50–52, 58.

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incongruity, showing how it can be possible—indeed, imperative—in thegravest of circumstances.

Think of this as consolation by practical equivalence. Ordinarily, onemight consider consolation “successful” only when it has assuaged a per-son’s grief, leaving them less sad than before, perhaps even happy despiteterrible circumstances. That notion of success may lie behind the worry,mentioned earlier, that humor’s consoling effects may only be superficial,leaving us with an approach to consolation that would be rather weak. Allthis talk of play, far from putting that worry to rest, may have actually stokedit further. For play is generally time-bound, and we must ask what happensto the person consoling oneself once it comes to an end. Does the con-solation hold only as long as play persists, and if so, does it make sense tospeak of consolation at all? In proposing “consolation by practical equiva-lence,” I am saying, in short: not necessarily, and yes, it does. As noted inmy first pass at what I mean by consolation, articulated above in terms ofattitudinal integrity, the psychological complexities involved in facing ourmortality should press us toward similarly complex accounts of consola-tion’s success. What I mean to suggest through this discussion of play is thatwe could consider consolation successful even when grief is not fully as-suaged, provided that one’s sense of agency and engagement with the worldhas been restored, for arguably, that is one crucial part of what we mighthave hoped to gain by assuagement.84

To put this somewhat differently, we can distinguish between conso-lation as a state of assuagement and consolation as a practice conducive toit. That “consolation” can refer to either one need not imply that it mustrefer to both at once, nor that assuagementmust be understood as the prac-tice of consolation’s only relevant achievement. My argument here is thatany consolatory practice, whether it be Boethius’s masterwork or somethingelse, could be considered a success in relation to positive practical effectson its recipient, whether or not those effects include a complete resolutionof grief. One could be sad, yet consoled. The chief reason for this emergesfrom my earlier remarks about attitudinal integrity. Play upon perspectivalincongruity may contribute to consolation’s practical success by overcom-ing any sense of self-alienation brought about by trying to choose betweenconflicting ideals about how to face our mortality, ideals that each havesome prima facie validity insofar as they are rooted in those incongruousperspectives. Consolation, in this deep sense, holds us together. While hold-ing together through play amounts to a deflation of the ordinary sense ofconsolation, it would be no trivial accomplishment, certainly not “carrion

84 Such restoration certainly drives many examples of the ancient consolation genre. Onhow ancient practices of consolation were as much ethical as psychological, see J. H. D. Scour-field, “Consolation,” in Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2012).

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comfort.”85 If we become alienated from ourselves amid the challenge offacing mortality, we may, in the words ofConsolation’s prisoner, grow weakand come asunder.86 Glossing this, I would suggest that we may even cometo feel as though there is little point in living up to death, because in thatself-alienation, death would already have struck a victory.

Some sort of grief work may, ultimately, have to figure into an approachto consolation for it to be fully satisfying, fully recognizable as consolation.87

But as Boethius’sConsolation suggests, it may be possible, through carefuluse of play, to leave grief unassuaged for a time to focus upon the practicalinterests of living. Not that grief is to be sidelined or simply ignored. Morepositively, this approach to consolation may create a space for grief to be pro-tected against the ethically suspect impulse to stanch it as soon as it arises,something that, in American society at least, has become all too common.88

In that protective space, the ritual-like activity of play may actually performconsiderable work upon grief—work that would extend beyond a temporallycircumscribed diversion. For the practice of playing upon perspectival in-congruity, as it helps us to achieve attitudinal integrity, may also cultivate(or perhaps just renew) in us a more generalized disposition to play, a sense,accompanying us throughout whatever remains to us of life, that integrativeplay could take hold in just about any future occasion that threatens to tearus apart. Having once successfully been consoled, in other words, may conferconfidence in the possibility of being consoled again, a possibility that could,in its own way, be consoling. And with that disposition, we may more readilyengage in the protracted, mundane work of relearning a disrupted world.89

It should be clear by now that if Consolation consoles—or points the waytoward consolation—it is hardly by means of illusion, conceived as fantasy

85 The phrase is from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem that begins, “Not, I’ll not, carrioncomfort, Despair, feast on thee.” The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner andN. H. Mackenzie, 4th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 99.

86 Cons. 5.3, 400–401. As I mentioned in note 51, the verb here ( fatiscere) could mean eitherof these things.

87 Then again, we should wonder whether there might be some sense of incompletion inthe very concept of consolation, such that my qualification of “practical equivalence” may notbe so great a departure from ordinary usage. A report of having been consoled—in the senseof assuagement, that is—seems different from simply a report of unadulterated happiness.At a minimum, one’s present happiness in consolation may still be darkened by the recollec-tion—or anticipation—of loss, conferring an “in-spite-of ” quality to the happiness. One mayhave discovered what William James called “the worm at the core of all our usual springs ofdelight.” The phrase appears in his first lecture on “the sick soul” in The Varieties of Religious Ex-perience. See James,Writings: 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), 132.

88 See Arthur Kleinman, “Culture, Bereavement, and Psychiatry,” Lancet 379 (2012): 608–9.Clawing after assuagement could be ethically suspect from a number of considerations, in-cluding disregard for the long-term process of grieving and the fact that one may have had verygood reasons to grieve in the first place.

89 Thomas Attig has developed a task-based conception of grief based around a practice of“relearning the world.” This may comport well with an understanding of consolation as apractical activity, oriented around play. See Thomas Attig, How We Grieve, rev. ed (Oxford: Ox-ford University Press, 2011).

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http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showLinks?crossref=10.1016%2FS0140-6736%2812%2960258-X


or denial of reality. Part of what animates its play is the prisoner’s conces-sion to the truth of Philosophy’s arguments, as well as the inevitability ofhis doom. In that sense, it involves an attitude of acceptance toward death.But another, no less crucial part of what animates the consolation is a spiritof resistance toward that reality, challenging the notion of inevitability in-sofar as it holds our focus on the present interests of life. In that sense, itinvolves something like an attitude of revolt. What I have been suggestingall along is that the ironic attitude involved in consolation as humor or playallows us to affirm both. Indeed, I call the attitude “ironic” for just this dou-bleness, a complexity that allows the added ironic sense that consolation maycome about through its refusal. Insofar as consolation serves to reengage uswith the practical interests of life, such irony may be a sort of virtue in face ofdeath, perhaps an auxiliary to courage.90 The chief trouble with the modernapproaches to disconsolation surveyed here is not that the ideals they es-pouse are necessarily wrong, but rather incomplete. In dispensing with illu-sion, they threaten to impoverish us by neglecting—perhaps by guilt of se-mantic association—the ludic.91

Much more remains to be said about this peculiar mode of consolation.My argument here comprises but a meager sketch, a provocation towardfurther thought. In trying to understand Boethius’s therapeutic irony, I havemostly used modern theoretical sources, but further studies might considerwhether he adapted his particular sense of irony from earlier exemplars.My own suspicion, although speculative, is that his most important sourcein this respect would not be the Greco-Roman consolatory tradition butrather the book of Job.92 Building on this, a fuller account might broachthe age-old question of whether Consolation could be read as a Christian text,

90 This is perhaps a surprising claim, given irony’s common association with disengagementor unconcern. One recent attempt at turning the tables and developing a positive ethical ac-count is Jonathan Lear’s A Case for Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).While the case he develops is distinct from the suggestions here, we share an interest in show-ing how, in light of our existential complexities, certain forms of irony may well help us engagemore deeply in our practical commitments. I suggest consolation as an auxiliary to couragebased on my reading of Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics (1115b5–1117b20) uses the immi-nent and contingent threat of death in battle as the paradigmatic case for courage. By exten-sion, we could speak of consolation as a virtue in face of the more distant yet necessary threatof mortality as such.

91 Freud actually considers humor to be an illusion, if a benign one. See “Humor,” 166.92 Relihan also suggests that resonances of Job can be heard in Consolation but does not develop

the point as extensively or radically as it could be. See Prisoner’s Philosophy, 12–14 and 127–28. LikeConsolation, the very form of the book of Job seems to resist any kind of straightforward resolution ofits central problem. While it has a tidy and, one might say, happy ending, the manner of its con-clusion sits in dramatic tension with earlier parts. And just before that concluding section, Job isreduced to an ambiguous silence by God’s overwhelming voice from the whirlwind—ambiguousin that Job’s fundamental questions remain unanswered. Carol Newsom has gone so far as to ar-gue, drawing upon Bakhtin, that the book of Job should be read as a “polyphonic text,” whichBakhtin might have also called a Menippean satire. (Recall that Bakhtin is also Payne’s prin-cipal source for her reading of Boethius.) See Newsom,The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imag-inations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. 3–31.

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perhaps especially how its irony in face of death could be understood as atheological performance of apophasis, a performance that seems to resisteschatology in favor of ethics.93 We might also wonder whether we find adoor into such a reading, even if a humble service entrance, through its con-struction of a ritual-play space.94 And beyond strictly interpretive questions,we should ask about further constructive implications. Viewed one way, thisreading pursues the longest, most tortured path back to the cliched notionthat humor can heal. But this historical ressourcement yields the more interest-ing possibility that consolation may happen through its very refusal, in thepsychological complexities of indirection. Against flattened conceptionsof consolation that circulate in modern thought, Boethius provides a stag-ing ground from which we might develop a minority report upon this ne-glected possibility, through both revisiting other satirical works and articu-lating more thoroughly what it could mean for the irony they embody tobe an attitudinal excellence in face of death.

If consolation lies in stitching together shards of ourselves, it may not bebecause it restores a seamless integrity. We may be in tatters from the first.And the stitches of this consolation perhaps add up to no more than a del-icate, temporary patch of open weave that must be reapplied with each con-vulsion of fortune, until the convulsions cease or one finds a surer hold, ifit were possible, in something like faith. Until then, consolation may liein the very possibility of the stitching. Such consolation is frail, but whenconvulsive interruptions threaten to leave the tensions of mortal existenceslack, we may be vivified simply by feeling it possible to respond with playful,but deadly serious, interruptions of our own.

93 In this connection, see Richard Rosengarten, “Satire and Negative Theology: Swift, Voltaire,and the Hermeneutical Dilemma,” Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 81 (2005): 107–14.

94 In this respect, we could follow Blackwood’s suggestion that the work is a “poetic liturgy.”See The “Consolation” of Boethius, 233–38.

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