The Consolation of Philosophy
by
Boethius
{Frontispiece: The Wheel of Fortune}
Bibliographical note
The text of this edition is taken from the translation by W.V. Cooper,
published by J.M. Dent and Co. Aldine House, London 1902. The
"Editorial Note", actually an introduction, has been moved from the
end of the book to the beginning.
{Title Page}
EDITORIAL NOTE
THE incompatibility of the sufferings of good men, the impunity
and success of bad men, with the government of the world by a good
God, has been a subject of thought among men ever since religion and
abstract questions have occupied the thoughts of mankind. The poetical
books of the Bible are full of it, particularly, of course the book of
Job, which is a dramatic poem entirely devoted to the subject. The New
Testament contains much teaching on the same question. Among the
Greeks the tragedians and later philosophers delighted in working out
its problems. But from the sixth to the seventeenth centuries of our
era the De Consolatione of Boethius, in its original Latin and in many
translations, was in the hands of almost all the educated people of
the world. The author's personal history was well known. He was a man
whose fortunes had risen to the highest pitch possible under the Roman
Empire; who had himself experienced the utter collapse of those
fortunes, and was known to have sustained himself through imprisonment
and even to torture and an unjust death by the thoughts which he left
to mankind in this book.
It is a work which appealed to Pagan and Christian alike. There
is no Christian doctrine relied upon throughout the work, but there is
also nothing which could be in conflict with Christianity. Even the
personification of Philosophy, though after the form of a pagan
goddess, is precisely like the 'Wisdom' of Solomon in the Apocrypha;
and the same habit of thought led the Jews to personify the 'Word' of
God, and use it as identical with God Himself; and the same led to
that identifying of the 'Word' with Christ, which we find in the first
chapter of St. John's Gospel. So, if there is nothing distinctly or
dogmatically Christian in the work, there is also nothing which can be
condemned as pagan, in spite of the strong influence of pagan
philosophy, with which Boethius was intimate.
For though some have held that the Christianity of Boethius was
foisted upon him, with his canonisation as St. Severinus, after his
death by those who thought he must have been too good a man to have
