The story
In 524 CE, the Roman senator Boethius sat in prison at Pavia in northern Italy awaiting execution and wrote The Consolation of Philosophy. Born around 477 into a high Roman family, he had been consul in 510 and a senior official under Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king who ruled Italy after the western empire fell in 476. He was then accused of treason, apparently for plotting with the eastern emperor, and was executed in 524 or 525. The book is a mix of prose and verse. Lady Philosophy visits the grieving narrator, drives away the poetic Muses who encouraged his self-pity, and cures him by reasoning.
Her argument runs in stages. Wealth, honor and power are gifts of Fortune, whose wheel turns, so they can be taken away and cannot be the true good. Real happiness lies in the highest good, which she identifies with God, and the wicked, however powerful, are not truly happy. In the final book she takes up a hard problem: how can humans have free will if God knows everything in advance? Her answer is that God lives in an eternal present, defined as the whole and perfect possession of endless life, so God sees events without determining them, as we see someone walking without making them walk. Boethius was a Christian, yet the book names no Christian doctrine and argues only from reason. He had also hoped to translate Plato and Aristotle, and his translations of Aristotle's logic were the main channel for Aristotle in western Europe until the twelfth century.
King Alfred the Great translated the Consolation into Old English, Chaucer into Middle English, and Queen Elizabeth I made her own translation in 1593. Dante placed Boethius among the wise in Paradise.
Why it mattered
- It carried Platonic and Aristotelian ideas into the Latin Middle Ages and was copied, translated and commented on for a thousand years.
- Its definition of eternity and its solution to free will and foreknowledge shaped medieval theology, including Aquinas.
- Its picture of Fortune's wheel became a standing image in medieval and Renaissance literature.
- It established the pattern of a philosophical consolation written under threat of death.
Sources
- Consolation of Philosophy Britannica
- Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Boethius: First of the Medievals? World History Encyclopedia
- Alfred the Great's Boethius University of South Florida
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