{"id":5077,"date":"2006-10-23T10:39:47","date_gmt":"2006-10-23T10:39:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/consolation.html"},"modified":"2006-10-23T10:39:47","modified_gmt":"2006-10-23T10:39:47","slug":"consolation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/consolation.html","title":{"rendered":"Consolation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is the memorial of Blessed Severius Boethius,<\/a> great scholar of (very) Late Antiquity. We know him today mostly because of The Consolation of Philosophy<\/a>, a work of which this site, the site of a project dedicated to the restoration and digitalization of a 10th century manuscript, says:<\/a><\/p>\n

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The Consolation of Philosophy<\/em> by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, the sixth-century Roman philosopher, poet, and statesman who reconciled himself with the seeming unfairness of life while awaiting execution on false charges of treason, was a powerful text throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It was especially respected in England, where it was repeatedly translated and otherwise transformed into English, starting with none other than Alfred the Great in the ninth century, and including (among others) Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century, and even Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth. It is not an exaggeration to claim, as many scholars have done, that one cannot understand much of the literature of the Middle Ages without a knowledge of the Consolation<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Interestingly, there has been conversation on and off over recent centuries on the question of whether Boethius was even a Christian. The old Catholic Encyclopedia treats the issue – as it stood a century or so ago. <\/a><\/p>\n

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Tradition began very early to represent Boethius as a martyr for the Christian Faith<\/a>. It was believed that among the accusations brought against him was devotion to the Catholic cause, which at that time was championed by the Emperor Justin against the Arian<\/a> Theodoric<\/a>. In the eighth century this tradition had assumed definite shape, and in many places Boethius was honoured as a martyr, and his feast observed on the twenty-third of October. In recent times, critical scholarship has gone to the opposite extreme, and there have not been wanting critics who asserted that Boethius was not a Christian<\/a> at all, or that, if he was, he abjured the Faith before his death. The foundation for this opinion is the fact that in the "Consolations of Philosophy" no mention is made of Christ or of the Christian religion<\/a>. A saner view, which seems at the present time to be prevalent among scholars, is that Boethius was a Christian<\/a> and remained a Christian<\/a> to the end. <\/p>\n

That he was a Christian<\/a> is proved by his theological tracts, some of which, as we shall see, are undoubtedly genuine. That he remained a Christian<\/a> is the obvious inference from the ascertained fact of his continued association with Symmachus; and if the "Consolations of Philosophy" bears no trace of Christian<\/a> influence, the explanation is at hand in the fact that it is an entirely artificial exercise, a philosophical dialogue modelled on strictly pagan productions, a treatise in which, according to the ideas of method which prevailed at the time, Christian<\/a> feeling and Christian<\/a> thought had no proper place. Besides, even if we disregard certain allusions which some interpret in a Christian<\/a> sense, there are passages in the treatise which seem plainly to hint that, after philosophy has poured out all her consolations for the benefit of the prisoner, there are more potent remedies (validiora remedia<\/em>) to which he may have recourse. There can be no reasonable doubt, then, that Boethius died a Christian<\/a>, though it is not easy to show from documentary sources that he died a martyr for the Catholic Faith. The absence of documentary evidence does not, however, prevent us from giving due value to the constant tradition on this point. The local cult of Boethius at Pavia was sanctioned when, in 1883, the Sacred Congregation of Rites confirmed the custom prevailing in that diocese of honouring St. Severinus Boethius, on the 23rd of October. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is the memorial of Blessed Severius Boethius, great scholar of (very) Late Antiquity. We know him today mostly because of The Consolation of Philosophy, a work of which this site, the site of a project dedicated to the restoration and digitalization of a 10th century manuscript, says: The Consolation of Philosophy by Anicius Manlius…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nConsolation - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/consolation.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Consolation - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today is the memorial of Blessed Severius Boethius, great scholar of (very) Late Antiquity. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5077\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}