Consolation of Philosophy
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A condemned minister argues himself out of self-pity by having Philosophy demonstrate that fortune never belonged to him, and that providence and human freedom are reconciled by a God who sees all time at once.
- fortune's wheel as a figure for goods that were never possessions
- the highest good and happiness as the same thing under two descriptions
- eternity as the whole of time held at once, not endless duration
- foreknowledge that observes without necessitating
Boethius wrote while awaiting execution by Theoderic on a charge of treason. The work alternates prose and verse, a form borrowed from Menippean satire, and stages a dialogue in which a personified Philosophy treats the prisoner as a patient: first the gentler remedies, then the argument that the goods fortune gives were never his to keep, then the harder question of how divine foreknowledge leaves human choices free. His answer distinguishes seeing from determining, and locates God outside time in an eternal present. Nothing in the book is explicitly Christian, which later readers found either scandalous or admirable.
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