On Moralism

oethius: The Consolation of Philosophy

he idea of a ‘classic’ is fraught. It should signify reputation; a classic should be a book people know about. But many of the greatest classics have been elided or forgotten. We have all heard of Shakespeare and Aristotle; but Boethius is one of these ‘classics’ that you have to climb a few steps of learning to hear tell of.

he logic of his Consolation of Philosophy is vigorous and acute, for it is the complaint of a talented statesman, theologian and philosopher betrayed by the senate of waning Rome, sentenced to prison, disgrace, and death. He has neither the taste nor the time for superficiality. He allows every objection, complaint and doubt its full course. What is more, he rises at times to the lyricism and profundity that only a genuine love of poetry and a deep worldview are able to inspire.

could write about his excellent method – and certainly one must take note of what he says about his method in order to fully appreciate him, for he deliberately starts with what is most plain and obvious. But instead I would like to dwell on his view of knowledge. Philosophy is, of course, the branch he is particularly concerned with. The task of philosophy is described by Boethius as that of “forming our habits and whole way of life on the celestial patterns”. That is, Philosophy sat him down and taught him astronomy, not because the pursuit of knowledge is noble, nor because science is healthy for the mind, or useful for society, but rather so that she could make him like the starts and planets: as regular, as orderly, as submissive to the will of God. That is one thing he mentions. Another is this: Philosophy is what we might call an inveterate moraliser. Not only does she give him such simple lessons as ‘follow God’; she goes so far as to repeat it every day. As a matter of fact, Boethius ascribes to the discipline of philosophy the task of providing such weapons as might defend him from misery when misfortunes came upon him. Such views were not unusual in the ancient world, and perhaps they do not sound so very strange even to us. But they should.

et me explain. In the first place, there is his very conception of philosophy. Descartes took up philosophy and made his great forward strides in response to very real doubts, but for that very reason he is closer in spirit to the ancient philosophers than the modern. David Hume, whom we may take as a representative of the enlightenment, confessed without shame that he was not deeply affected by his philosophy: he would write that we can have no certainty about anything substantial in the morning, and live an ordinary, merry life with his friends in the evening. Schopenhauer, again, another great philosopher, let his philosophy draw him to profess ascetic ideals, but he himself was far from an ascetic. And remember that the qualification that a modern professor of philosophy must meet is not commitment to an ideal or consistency of lifestyle, so much as wide and critical learning. Have I made it clear enough that the primary meaning of ‘philosophy’ for us is quite different from what it was for Boethius? It was a life to him, it is a study to us.

n the second place, his blithe ardour for moralising ought to sit uneasily with us. For the educated man, I say bluntly, moralising is immoral. The thought of studying history purely to find moral lessons ought to embarrass us; no one who has sought both accuracy and fine-sounding lessons in history can succeed very well in both aims. A lesson ought to teach us, and though we might find things we already believe, or want to believe, reflected in history, we will seldom learn anything new so far as ethics is concerned. It is easy to find historical examples of virtue rewarded and punished vice. But history does not see the virtuous rewarded and the vicious disgraced any more than it sees the vicious rewarded and the virtuous disgraced. And of course, most of the most virtuous sink below the surface of history, and we never even hear about them.

nd is it not a little peculiar that Philosophy taught Boethius astronomy, so that he could live an orderly and obedient life? Why should the way the stars go round affect the way we go round? Unless he already wants to live an orderly life, the observation that those great mindless fires do will hardly be a great incentive. Even if it were, you see at once that the stars do a very different thing to us; you might as well compare an orderly man to a yo-yo as to the stars.

oralising, as I say, is immoral: for it simplifies matters that God has made complex. The stars teach us very little about how we should live. Historical examples of virtue and vice rarely, if ever, apply directly to the contingencies and complexities of the present.

oethius, see there, is watching us with a puzzled look, incredulous that we should come to such conclusions, that we should so defame Lady Philosophy. He sits unwavering in the moralising party. He never thought to doubt its truth until we said this. For as a matter of fact, very few serious thinkers have doubted its truth until relatively recently. Even – no, especially – the scholars of the Renaissance are with him. History gave them “precepts, exhortations, counsels, and good persuasions, comprehended in quick sentences and eloquent orations”. That is a quote from Elyot, but you need not look far to find the same sentiment in Erasmus, or Ascham, or for that matter Thucydides or Johnson or Gibbon.

f course, we must allow that it is scarcely possible to ignore the great barriers that lie between them and us. I am referring to centuries of experience, a scientific revolution, a great boom in historical accuracy and breadth, in philosophy an Aufklärung or enlightenment, in ethics and politics an irreversible realisation of the full force of material, psychological and cultural influences. Nonetheless, I think there is at least one good reason to take seriously this old image of philosophy and science and history. It is, that it apparently worked. We are not dealing with fools here, yet these men, of outstanding learning and genius, so far from coming to our conclusion, that philosophy is best treated as an academic discipline and that science and history cannot teach moral lessons, actually stood by the cause which we have called ‘moralism’. And that, even though in their age as in ours philosophy, as Bacon observed, could lead to atheism.

o how are we to interpret the idea? How are we to make it acceptable to ourselves? How, in short, are we to come to terms with the fact that many of the most learned and original thinkers in history have been unabashed ‘moralisers’?

shall content myself with explaining what I think are the first two steps, of which the very first is differentiating three classes of ‘moralising’. The first is moralising pure and simple: the lowest kind, whereby say ‘history (or indeed, this or that story) teaches us that we ought to be good’. I do not think much of that kind, though it is not always out of place. Too often, however, it leans its weight on poor reasoning, and in its attempt to teach wise living neglects wise thinking.

he second class is moralising that moralises to the imagination. Livy says that history shows us the deeds whence we can choose “what deeds we will imitate, and what deeds, base from start to end, we will avoid”. Rather than doing our duty merely as our duty, we may do it in imitation of the heroes – whoever we count as our heroes. Athanasius noted that the mere memory of St Antony helped him act in a holier way. At its purest, this is makebelief: as if Athanasius pretended he was St Antony, or a modern soldier pretended to be a patriotic Roman. That is the lowest manifestation of this second kind of moralising, but also the highest. I am sure we will revisit it in a future article.

he third class, the Boethian or philosophical class, is different to both of these. We may call it the moral viewpoint. It sees the world in moral terms, and by extension sees morality in cosmic terms. Justice is a human virtue, but it is also part of the fabric of the history; in fact, it is primarily a historical phenomenon, God’s work, and only our work, a human business, because we share a part of God’s nature. Orderliness, again, is a human virtue; so is logicality. But before they can be human virtues, they must be divine virtues, and so we see them in the courses of the stars. Straightforward, simplistic moralising would say, “therefore, since God moves he stars in an rational pattern, we also ought to act rationally.” The philosophical approach, this moral viewpoint, would reply, “yes; but you see also, of course, that when we are rational, we have the same forces at work in us as are at work in the stars. And because we consciously choose rationality, unlike the inanimate stars, we are actually outdoing the stars and excelling them.”

ou see at once that this third class of ‘moralising’ contains the other two and goes beyond them. As with the lower classes, we learn the lessons of the past and the universe, and also choose to imitate the past and the universe. But the reason why we learn and imitate is that we have first judged the universe and read into the apparently amoral scientific motions and events moral value. There are charming tales about Alfred the Great’s humility and patience when he was exiled from his kingship. The first kind of moral interpretation would tell us, “therefore, be humble and patient”, or, “humility and patience pay.” The second kind says, “be as humble and patient as Alfred was: think about him when you are being humbly patient”. The third tells us little more than that we are not alone when we are humble and patient, and that the same thing that we admire in Alfred we can recreate in ourselves. It says less than either of the others, but naturally allows for the possibility of both of the others. That is, if you admire virtue in Alfred, you might as a consequence tell yourself, “be virtuous”, and you might also tell yourself, “remind yourself of him when you do.”

he full power of this view may be seen by a survey of the literature that preceded the enlightenment, for it is all-pervasive. It is why Dante can speak of ‘the love that moves the sun and other stars’, instead of “inertia and gravity”.

ranted that there are different kinds of moralising, still, it will be asked, are they not all quite as naïve? Not the least of our criticisms of moralising is that it forces into a moral mold what was never meant to be so constrained; and even our ‘moral viewpoint’ does not escape that – in truth, consists of nothing but that. Does it not compel us to take that judgmental view of history that sees the whole polychrome in black and white? Looking at history as the ‘battleground of good and evil’, are we not forced to decide that so-and-so was evil, and such-and-such was good, when if fact so-and-so was as mixed a piece of work as such-and-such?

confess the moral viewpoint does not safeguard us from that, and I stress once more that on my view that kind of thinking is an error I would give a great deal to avoid. In part, it is avoided by seeing not good and bad people, but good and bad in people, or, on the broader scene, not good and bad forces in the universe, but good and bad consequences of those forces. But to navigate this pass with the utmost safety, we must take the second step.

onsider, please, the direction moralising ordinarily proceeds in. Whatever it might pretend, it starts with our own values, and then reads them into the external world. It starts with conceptions like reason, justice, love and wisdom, and then uses the world like a great cross-word to write them in. This is the most basic operation of the moral view point, as of the other classes of moralising we mentioned, and on my view it may be done rightly just as it may be done badly. But the moral viewpoint may be applied in the other direction too, and must be applied in the other direction first, if it is to hit upon solid truth. It is better not to judge historical characters by our standards before we have evaluated ourselves by their examples, and before we view the universe as an enormous person, with rationality, love, hate, irrationality, we should strive to comprehend that people are the universe compressed. We must mind our own business before we poke about in the business of others.

he examples we took from Boethius will make clear what I mean.

1. Philosophy “used to form Boethius’ habits and the manner of his entire life on the examples of the celestial order.”

he educational ploy here, if we may call it that, is this. Boethius is seeking to live a rational life, and in order to make him feel the significance of that, Philosophy tells him that he is reënacting, on a smaller but notwithstanding more significant scale, the action of the universe. She does not say, “the stars are rational, just like humans beings should be;” no; she says, “human beings can be rational just like the stars are”. If we resolve to view this through a clear, untinted lens, we see that Philosphy is not moralising the universe, but rather de-moralising man: for what Boethius might have thought a noble moral effort before – that attempt to be rational – he is now told is merely a scientific phenomenon – the kind of thing the stars have been doing at God’s behest all this long while.

2. Philosophy “gave him such weapons as might have guarded him [from misery] with unconquerable resilience, had he not cast them away beforehand”.

ere we have the same principle spelt out more clearly. Philosophy searches out the nature and composition of the whole universe; but its first purpose is to right and balance the nature and composition of the philosopher themself. Of course, that describes ancient philosophy, not modern: for modern philosophy has chosen another ideal. Yet a modern philosopher may do his modern philosophy to his modern ideal without sacrificing the ancient ideal; and there is surely even in our own day great weight behind Lady Philosophy’s song, that it is shameful for a man to know the courses of the winds and waves, the rise and fall of seasons and suns, and all the while be quite unequal to so crucial a task as knowing himself and governing his emotions: being sui compos.

3. There is Philosophy’s tedious repetition: follow God. – Follow God. – Follow God.

ou see at once that this makes more sense once we have established the foregoing. It is suspect to make this the conclusion of every scientific, historic, or philosophical lesson, for most of the things to be known do not teach this. But if he sees himself as somehow a part of the things he studies, then they teach him practical lessons for himself; and even when he cannot clearly see how they relate to him, he knows that they lay obligation on him to know himself at least as well as he knows them, and so act rightly. This particular maxim, “follow God”, is, of course, inexhaustible. Doubtless we shall return to the topic of maxims in a later article.

nd so it comes about that Lady Philosophy is Boethius’ science teacher; so it comes that amidst all her arcane metaphysics and penetrating logic she finds time to tell him, ‘follow God’; so it comes that she herself is his defense against misery. She is not a trite moraliser, unless we count under that name those who think it valid to believe in the moral nature of the universe: that history is a ceaseless war between good and evil, what is noble and what is base; that the celestial fires hang in a delicate balance between order and chaos. With such a vision, philosophers, scientists, historians, have almost more incentive to virtue than anyone else, since they have constantly before their eyes the nature of good and evil. Naturally, it did not always play out that way in antiquity, and not at all today. But those who hold this view of knowledge can be held to its consequences.

t remains to consider the full consequences of allowing such a view – they are enormous and they are dangerous, but the centuries have judged them worthwhile. There are two methods in the pursuit of knowledge which I consider unstable at best: the first, that it does nothing more than satisfy curiosity with insignificant facts, the second, that it teaches us lessons, and is entirely painted in the black and white of good and evil. I fear both methods, and I put it to you that we must search ourselves to see whether this method, Boethius’ insight, is not the only safe way between them both.