2. 'Ad Johannem Diaconum: Utrum Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus de Divinitate substantialiter praedicentur.'
3. 'Ad eundem: Quomodo substantiae in eo quod sint bonae sint cum non sint substantialia bona.'
4. 'De Fide Catholica.'
5. 'Contra Eutychen et Nestorium.'
It may be said at once that in the earlier MSS. the fourth treatise is not attributed to Boethius. It seems to have been included with the others by some mistake, and I shall therefore in the following remarks assume that it is not his, and shall confine my attention to the first three and the fifth.
Difficulty as to religious position of Boethius.
Even as to these, notwithstanding the nearly unanimous voice of the early Middle Ages (as represented by MSS. of the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Centuries) assigning them to Boethius as their author, scholars, especially recent scholars, have felt the gravest possible doubts of their being really his, doubts which have of late ripened into an almost complete certainty that he was not their author. The difficulty does not arise from anything in the diction or in the theology which points to a later age as the time of their composition, but from the startling contrast which they present to the religious atmosphere of the 'Consolation of Philosophy.' Here, in these theological treatises, we have the author entering cheerfully into the most abstruse points of the controversy concerning the Nature of Christ, without apparently one wavering thought as to the Deity of the Son of Mary. There, in the 'Consolation,' a book written in prison and in disgrace, with death at the executioner's hands impending over him—a book in which above all others we should have expected a man possessing the Christian faith to dwell upon the promises of Christianity—the name of Christ is never once mentioned, the tone, though religious and reverential, is that of a Theist only; and from beginning to end, except one or two sentences in which an obscure allusion may possibly be detected to the Christian revelation, there is nothing which might not have been written by a Greek philosopher ignorant of the very name of Christianity. Of the various attempts which have been made to solve this riddle perhaps the most ingenious is that of M. Charles Jourdain, who, in a monograph devoted to the subject[109], seeks to prove that the author of the theological treatises referred to was a certain Boethus, an African Bishop of the Byzacene Province, who was banished to Sardinia about the year 504 by the Vandal King Thrasamond.
Not thus, however, as it now appears, is the knot to be cut. And after all, M. Jourdain, in arguing, as he seems disposed to argue, against any external profession of Christianity on the part of Boethius, introduces contradictions greater than any that his theory would remove. To any person acquainted with the thoughts and words of the little coterie of Roman nobles to which Boethius belonged, it will seem absolutely impossible that the son-in-law of Symmachus, the receiver of the praises of Ennodius and Cassiodorus, should have been a professed votary of the old Paganism. It is not the theological treatises coming from a man in his position which are hard to account for; it is the apparently non-Christian tone of the 'Consolation.'
The fragment now before us shows that the old-fashioned belief in Boethius as a theologian was well founded. 'He wrote a book concerning the Holy Trinity, and certain dogmatic chapters, and a book against Nestorius.' That is a sufficiently accurate resumé of the four theological treatises enumerated above. Here Usener also observes—and I am inclined to agree with him—that there is a certain resemblance between the style of thought of these treatises and that of the 'Consolation' itself. They are, after all, philosophical rather than religious; one of the earliest samples of that kind of logical discussion of theological dogmas which the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages so delighted to indulge in. The young philosopher, hearing at his father-in-law's table the discussions between Chalcedonian and Monophysite with which all Rome resounded, on account of the prolonged strife with the Church of Constantinople, set himself down to discuss the same topics which they were wrangling over by the light—to him so clear and precious—of the Greek philosophy. There was perhaps in this employment neither reverence nor irreverence. He had not St. Augustine's intense and almost passionate conviction of the truth of Christianity; but he was quite willing to accept it and to discourse upon it, as he discoursed on Arithmetic, Music, and Geometry.
But when premature old age, solitude, and the loss of liberty befell him, it was not to the highly elaborated Christian theology of the Sixth Century that he turned for support and consolation. Probably enough the very fact that he knew some of the pitfalls in the way deterred him from that dangerous journey, where the slightest deviation on either side landed him in some detested heresy, the heresy of Nestorius or of Eutyches. 'On revient toujours à ses premiers amours;' and even so Boethius, though undoubtedly professing himself a Christian, and about to die in full communion with the Catholic Church, turned for comfort in his dungeon to the philosophical studies of his youth, especially to the ethical writings of Plato and Aristotle.