Person

Boethius

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c. AD 477-524) was a Roman senator, consul, philosopher, and theologian whose translations of and commentaries on Aristotle's logical works (the logica vetus) became the principal philosophical curriculum of the early medieval West. His five short theological treatises (Opuscula sacra), especially De Trinitate and Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, apply Aristotelian categorical metaphysics to Trinitarian and Christological doctrine and supply the Latin tradition with the canonical definition of person (naturae rationalis individua substantia) that Aquinas, the Council of Chalcedon (in its later reception), and the entire scholastic tradition would inherit. He is also the author of De Consolatione Philosophiae (524), composed in prison awaiting execution, one of the most-read works of the European Middle Ages.

Biographical sketch

Born c. AD 477 into the powerful Anicia family of Roman senators; orphaned young, raised by Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus (whose daughter Rusticiana he later married)
Educated in Rome and possibly Athens or Alexandria; mastered Greek (an unusual skill in the Latin West of his time)
Conceived a project to translate all of Aristotle and all of Plato into Latin and to harmonize them, completed translations of Aristotle's Categories and On Interpretation, and probably Prior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations (the logica vetus); his commentaries on Aristotle and Porphyry shape early medieval logic
Held high office under Theodoric the Ostrogoth, Arian king of Italy: consul AD 510; magister officiorum (head of court services) c. 522
Defended a fellow senator, Albinus, against charges of treasonous correspondence with the Eastern (Catholic / Nicene) emperor Justin I; was himself implicated
Imprisoned at Pavia c. 523, charged with magic and treason; wrote De Consolatione Philosophiae in prison
Executed by torture and clubbing in 524 or 525, on Theodoric's orders
Cult as Christian martyr ("Saint Severinus") confirmed at Pavia in 1883 by Leo XIII

Major works

Logical / philosophical

Translations of Aristotle's Categories and On Interpretation (and likely the rest of the Organon; some translations lost)
Commentaries on Aristotle's Categories and On Interpretation (two each, a shorter and longer commentary)
Commentaries on Porphyry's Isagoge (introduction to Aristotelian categories), two versions; the Isagoge with Boethius's commentary becomes the standard medieval introduction to logic
De divisione (on logical division)
De topicis differentiis (on dialectical topics)
De institutione arithmetica and De institutione musica, texts on the quadrivium (the four mathematical arts), influential through the Middle Ages

Theological, the Opuscula sacra (five treatises)

I. De Trinitate (How the Trinity Is One God Not Three Gods), the principal Latin technical treatment of the Trinity between Augustine and Aquinas
II. Utrum Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus de divinitate substantialiter praedicentur, on whether Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are predicated of the divinity substantially or relatively
III. Quomodo substantiae (the De Hebdomadibus), on how substances are good in virtue of being, when they are not substantially good
IV. De fide catholica, a brief catechetical creed-summary
V. Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, on Christology; gives the canonical Latin definition of person

De Consolatione Philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy, 524)

Five-book prosimetric (alternating prose and verse) dialogue between Boethius and Lady Philosophy
Major themes: Fortune and the highest good, divine providence, free will and foreknowledge (book V, the famous treatment of "eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of unlimited life"), evil as privation
One of the most-copied, most-translated works of the European Middle Ages, Alfred the Great translated it into Old English; Chaucer translated it into Middle English; Queen Elizabeth I translated parts; Dante draws on it in Convivio and Paradiso

Theological contributions

1. The classical Latin definition of person

In Contra Eutychen et Nestorium (Opuscula V), Boethius gives the formula that becomes canonical:

Persona est naturae rationalis individua substantia, "A person is an individual substance of a rational nature."

This definition has three load-bearing pieces:

Substantia, a person is something that subsists on its own, not an accident
Naturae rationalis, restricted to natures that are rational (intellectual); excludes sub-rational individuals
Individua, incommunicable, a particular, not a universal kind

Aquinas inherits this definition (ST I q. 29 a. 1) and applies it across Trinitarian theology (three Persons in God), Christology (the one Person of Christ in two natures, Chalcedon), and human anthropology. The Boethian definition explicitly does not require self-consciousness or psychological self-mastery, both of which are accidents of intellectual natures, not constitutive of personhood. This is the basis on which the Latin-Thomist tradition critiques modern social trinitarianism's "three centers of self-consciousness" as a different concept smuggled in under the same word. (See Social Trinitarianism.)

2. Absolute vs relative predicates of God

In De Trinitate (Opuscula I) and Utrum Pater et Filius (Opuscula II), Boethius articulates the distinction the entire later Latin tradition would presuppose: when we predicate something of God, the predicate is either absolute (said of the divine essence, eternity, omniscience, goodness, simplicity, etc.) or relative (said of the relations between Persons, paternity, filiation, spiration). Anything else is metaphorical or not properly predicated of God at all. The source video paraphrases this directly: "for the fathers there were only two proper predicates of God, terms were either absolute or relative."

This distinction is the lever by which Boethius (following Augustine, leading to Aquinas) shows that the Trinitarian formula does not multiply God's substance. The Father / Son / Spirit distinction is relative, not absolute, so positing it does not add anything to God essentially.

3. Aristotelian-categorical Trinitarian analysis

De Trinitate (Opuscula I) is the first systematic Latin application of Aristotle's Categories to the Trinity. Boethius walks the categories one by one (substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, passion) and shows that only substance (essentially) and relation (relatively) can be predicated of God in their proper senses; the others either reduce to substance or apply only metaphorically. This is the structural template that Aquinas's Summa Theologiae I qq. 27-29 systematizes. (See Relation (Thomist Metaphysics).)

4. De Consolatione on eternity and foreknowledge

Book V's definition of eternity as interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio, "the simultaneous and complete possession of unlimited life", becomes the standard Christian formulation. Used to handle the foreknowledge / free will problem: God knows future contingents not because He sees them as future but because He sees them in the eternal now; this preserves both creaturely contingency and divine knowledge. Anselm, Aquinas, and later Christian responses to the foreknowledge dilemma all build on this.

Connection to codex concepts

Trinity, Boethius supplies the substance vs relation lever and the definition of person; Aquinas's ST I qq. 27-43 presupposes him throughout
Relation (Thomist Metaphysics), Boethius transmits the Aristotelian categorical framework into Latin Trinitarian theology
Hypostatic Union, Chalcedon's definition that the one Person of Christ subsists in two natures uses persona in Boethius's sense; the Council itself preceded Boethius, but its later reception in the Latin West is through his vocabulary
Trinity Coherence Defense (Latin-Thomist), Boethius's absolute / relative predicate distinction is one of the load-bearing premises
Social Trinitarianism, Boethius's definition of person (without the self-consciousness criterion) is the principal patristic warrant for the Latin critique
Foreknowledge vs Causation, Consolation book V on eternity / foreknowledge (Boethius cited in Actus Purus and Foreknowledge vs Causation in the codex extraction)