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bkoser 's review for:
"Until about two hundred years ago it would, I think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it. To acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalised in the Middle Ages." -- C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image
"What name of equal distinction has suffered such wane?" -- H. R. Patch
Boethius was the "last of the Romans, first of the scholastics". Until the Sack of Constantinople when Greek priests fled west with their manuscripts, the European medievals only knew Aristotle through his writing. He influenced Dante, Aquinas, Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare, and for a time rivaled the Bible and St. Augustine in popularity. Until reading The Discarded Image, I'd never even heard of him.
The Consolation of Philosophy lies halfway between Plato and Dante: it's a Socratic dialogue about why bad things happen to good people, what is the ultimate good, and how to resolve God's foreknowledge with human free will, framed as a conversation between Boethius (in prison in reality and in the story) and Lady Philosophy.
C. S. Lewis argues that medieval Christians were philosophically closer to their contemporary pagans than to modern Christians. Nothing drives that point home like reading this book and knowing that scholars disagree on if Boethius was a Christian.
I was nervous reading the first fifth of the book; I didn't get it and was hoping to not have another Robinson Crusoe situation (aka I don't like a highly-regarded book). But the philosophy gradually ramps up into some heady stuff, and I did end up enjoying it.
"What name of equal distinction has suffered such wane?" -- H. R. Patch
Boethius was the "last of the Romans, first of the scholastics". Until the Sack of Constantinople when Greek priests fled west with their manuscripts, the European medievals only knew Aristotle through his writing. He influenced Dante, Aquinas, Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare, and for a time rivaled the Bible and St. Augustine in popularity. Until reading The Discarded Image, I'd never even heard of him.
The Consolation of Philosophy lies halfway between Plato and Dante: it's a Socratic dialogue about why bad things happen to good people, what is the ultimate good, and how to resolve God's foreknowledge with human free will, framed as a conversation between Boethius (in prison in reality and in the story) and Lady Philosophy.
C. S. Lewis argues that medieval Christians were philosophically closer to their contemporary pagans than to modern Christians. Nothing drives that point home like reading this book and knowing that scholars disagree on if Boethius was a Christian.
I was nervous reading the first fifth of the book; I didn't get it and was hoping to not have another Robinson Crusoe situation (aka I don't like a highly-regarded book). But the philosophy gradually ramps up into some heady stuff, and I did end up enjoying it.