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Title: The Consolation of Philosophy: Revised Edition (Penguin Classics)
ISBN: 0140447806
Author:
Ancius Boethius
Publicate Date: 1999-05-01
Publish: 1999-05-01
List Price: $15.00
Average Customer Rating: 5.0
Format: Paperback
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Recovering from amnesia
Each time I teach Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy in my Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy course, I'm struck by what a wonderful text it is. There are at least three reasons for this.
First, it's as good an introduction to the worldview of the late antiquity/early medieval periods as one's likely to find. That worldview is likely to strike contemporary ears as foreign--Boethius' conflation, for example, of the good, happiness, and God in Book III--but it's well worth attending to.
Second, reading Boethius is an education in good argumentation. One can disagree with the premises upon which his arguments rest while still admiring and profiting from the rigor of the arguments themselves. Boethius himself tells us that his method is to "unfold" conclusions "without the help of any external aid"--tradition or authority--"but [instead] with one internal proof grafted upon another so that each [draws] its credibility from that which preceded" (p. 82). And he lives up to his word.
Finally, the existential questions Boethius explores in the Consolation are astoundingly vital today. Here's a guy who was once one of the most powerful men in the Roman empire fallen from grace and facing a very messy death. In writing the Consolation, he tries to come to terms with the fickleness of fortune, the problem of evil (why do bad things happen to good people), the secret of happiness, the issue of free will, and the meaning of human existence. Boethius finally concludes that he, like most humans, had been suffering from what might be called philosophical amnesia. He'd allowed his fast-paced lifestyle to induce forgetfulness of who he was and the way he should live his life. In those final months of his life, living in a solitary jail cell and pondering his own mortality, Boethius begins to remember. Reading his wonderful little book can help us, fifteen hundred years later, to awaken from our own amnesias.
Of all the translations of the Consolation I've read, Victor Watts' is my favorite. But be forewarned: his Introduction to the book will tell you almost nothing about the contents and issues of Boethius' book.
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2: This book changed my life.
"Consolation of Philosophy" was on the syllabus for a "History of Philosophy" class I took my senior year in college. To say that I loved it would be an understatement. I still have the copy I read back then (academic year 1980/1981) and I have re-read it several times over the years. I treasure this book like none other.
I looked through my copy to type out a passage that I find particularly inspiring, but found that I couldn't because there are so many. I've recommended it to literally dozens of people, and every one to took me up on my suggestion thanked me for it.
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3: The Last Classsical Man
The Consolation is a philosophical treatise written by Boethius (c. 480-524 A.D.) while awaiting his execution after being imprisoned by the Gothic emperor Theodoric. The first time I heard of Boethius and his most famous composition was, as so often is the case, when I was reading another work. The work in question is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole. The main character of O'Toole's novel, one Ignatius J. Reilly, had based his entire life and worldview around the philosophy of Boethius and his assessment of Fortune. A great work in its own right, A Confederacy of Dunces left a lasting impression in my mind and, when by chance I came across a copy of the Consolation in the used bookstore I jumped at the opportunity to see for myself what Boethius had to say.
The work is composed of five books beginning with Boethius struggling to make sense of his imprisonment and pending execution. Confronted with a fate that is seemingly at odds with the virtue and faith with which he has conducted his life, Boethius is about to succumb to the sorrow that is filling his thoughts. Just then he notices the presence of a woman in his cell, the awe-inspiring Philosophy. She bemoans that Boethius, once such an avid student of hers, is now about to abandon all that he had previously gained. Thus begins a journey of reason and contemplation between the two until Boethius in the end finds the consolation that he had almost given up upon. Interspersed between the dialogues of Boethius and Philosophy are a number of poems that range in subject matter and content. More numerous at the beginning of the work, the poems often times serve as transitions between arguments or help to put difficult concepts into a clearer light. Thus a remarkable harmony is reached between prose and poetry that can be appreciated even in an English translation, a rare feat indeed.
It is perhaps significant to understand the time in which Boethius lived a bit better to gain a more accurate reading of his work. Living long after Constantine's conversion to Christianity in the 4th century A.D., it is widely accepted that Boethius was a Christian and believer of the tenants of the Catholic Church (at a time when the Gothic emperor Theodoric, also a Christian but belonging like all Goths to the heretical Arian sect that believed that the father and son were not of one substance). One must find it a bit peculiar than that at no point in Boethius' text is Christianity mentioned in any overt context. To find a believer in his last days before death turning not to theology for comfort, as one might expect, but rather to philosophy has raised many questions about the nature of Boethius' belief. But one only has to look to the title of the work to see that Boethius is choosing philosophy for the subject of his work and could very well indeed have thought theology a better consolation, although one that would be and should be treated in an altogether separate treatise. With this in mind, Boethius draws on the works of the great philosophers and thinkers of antiquity; Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, St. Augustine, the Stoics, and the Neo-Platonists. This feat being all the more remarkable because Boethius apparently relied on his own memory to produce the arguments and passages seeing as he had no access to any literary sources while imprisoned.
Boethius has rightly been called the last classical man. Indeed his thoughts and works can be seen as forming a bridge etween the classical world and the Middle Ages. The Consolation influenced countless numbers of theologians throughout the Middle Ages and direct references are to be found in the works of masters such as Dante and Chaucer. His lonely contemplation of good and evil, fate and free will, fortune and the nature of happiness certainly still have an allure to inquisitive minds to this day.
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4: truly consoling
I don't read a lot of philosophy texts, but I read this one after my father died and was surprised to find it very meaningful and truly consoling.
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5: A Literary and Philosophical Masterpiece
Boethius, in his "Consolation" written in prison shortly before his death, turns to the pre-Christian philosophers and the tradition of Rome and Greece for aid and comfort. The work is one of the most historically important works ever written: it is through Boethius that we had knowledge of Aristotle during the middle ages.
The work takes the form of a Platonic dialogue, mixing prose and poetry as the author slowly convalesces with the aid of Philosophy, his "nurse." This literary style has been imitated many times since.
The work ought to be read not only for its historical and literary appeal, but for its arguments, which are as cogent as they were nearly two thousand years ago.
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