Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities
by james turner
princeton, 576 pages, $35
She appeared to him in the darkest of times. In the early part of the sixth century, the sun had set on the western Roman Empire. Its greatest intellectual, a highborn official named Boethius—among the last in his era to embody the old synthesis of Christian and classical learning—had fallen out of favor with the Ostrogoth ruler Theodoric. Boethius found himself in a dungeon near Milan, awaiting execution and fighting off despair. It was then, says Boethius, that the majestic figure of Lady Philosophy appeared to him in his cell and stirred him to banish his fears, accept her strong medicine, and regain the straight, right road.
To judge from the growing body of literature on the decline of the liberal arts, there are many today who fear that the humanities themselves are headed for a fatal loss of prestige and patronage, victims, like Boethius, of barbarians in power. At the end of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre draws a parallel between our time and the decline of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, suggesting that we too live in a cultural twilight, at the beginnings of “new dark ages which are already upon us.” Despair, now as then, is a real temptation.
