The Consolation of Philosophy

While under arrest and awaiting execution by King Theodoric for threatening his position by attempting to reconcile a schism between Rome and Constantinople in 524, Boethius wrote his best know work, The Consolation of Philosophy, in which he argues that despite the seeming injustice of the world, there is, in Platonic fashion, a higher realm and that all else is subordinate to that divine Providence.

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Citation

King Alfred’s Version of the Consolations of Boethius. Done into Modern English, with an Introduction by Walter John Sedgefield Litt.D. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900).

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Plato (Author)

Platonic thought exerted a major influence on both Boethius’s philosophy. This is particularly true with regard to Boethius’s metaphysics and ethics.
Aristotle (Author)

Boethius translated and wrote commentaries on several of Aristotle’s works and was strongly influenced by Aristotelian thought on logic, reason, and mind.
Plotinus (Author)

Boethius was strongly influenced by Plotinian and Neoplatonic thought and made a major effort in The Consolation to incorporate the philosophy into a Christian framework.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Author)

Boethius is cited heavily in several of Aquinas’s major works, including the Summa Theologiae, and is referred to by him as “Beatus Boethius” (Blessed Boethius).
Geoffrey Chaucer (Author)

Notably, Chaucer completed a translation The Consolation of Philosophy, and incorporated Boethian themes and imagery into several of his works, including The Canterbury Tales, and Troilus and Criseyde.

Critical Responses

Book

The Cambridge Companion to Boethius

John Marenbon

The The Cambridge Companion is structured in large part as an exploration of The Consolation and it’s legacy as Boethius’s seminal work. It situates the work in relation to Boethius’s other thought, earlier thinkers Boethius drew upon, and later medieval thinkers who it inspired.

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Connected Readings

Book

Dialogues, vol. 2

Plato

Phaedo

Both the Phaedo and The Consolation of Philosophy share a major theme of philosophy as a means of attaining comfort and salvation for the immortal soul in the face of misfortune and death.

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Dialogues, vol. 3 - Republic, Timaeus, Critias

Plato

Plato’s Republic

Both works contain closely connected philosophical explorations of justice, notably with regard to its role in unifying the soul. Philosophy is treated as the only reliable means by which the soul can reach the Form of the Good and attain true happiness.

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What to read next.

The Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle

Both works understand happiness as being the ultimate human good. Both identify true happiness as being fundamentally rational.

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Book

The Metaphysics

Aristotle

As in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Boethius understands the highest being in the universe (for Aristotle, the Unmoved Mover; for Boethius, the Christian God) as the source of all being and the goal of all desire. For both of them, the highest being is eternal, unchanging, pure actuality.

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