Boethius said that knowledge alone is impervious to a change of fate and that his message is still relevant today.
Boethius said that knowledge alone is impervious to a change of fate and that his message is still relevant today.
For many centuries into the Middle Ages, the most influential work of philosophy was not the work of Aristotle or Plato, but by someone who came nearly a millennium after them. We are talking about Boethius and his book, philosophy of consolation, Which he wrote as a kind of prison magazine just before he was hanged. This was to be his legacy. Boethius came from a family of early Christian converts, and counted two Roman emperors and a pope among his ancestors.
He came to the attention of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric, then ruling the Roman Empire. By the age of 30, Boethius had invented a solarium and a water clock for the ruler. Soon he became the head of the royal bureaucracy. This was the time when Christian doctrine was still forming and a schism (on the physical form of Christ) arose in which Boethius felt morally compelled against the position of king. He was imprisoned for conspiracy in AD 523, and tortured and executed the following year.
Thus, suddenly, by fame and fortune, he loses everything. The subject of their reaction to this is Consolation And its message is in some ways similar to that of the Buddha.
tempts to cheat
As he contemplates his fate, Boethius writes that he is visited by a woman, who is the personification of Philosophy. She likens the nature of luck to the wheel of fortune, whose needle stops randomly at reward or punishment. Or keeps on moving, swinging from one extreme to another.
Destiny is described as a demon who seduces only to be deceived and then leaves the person. And this is the nature of fate: if she (called Lady Fortune) stops spinning her wheel, she will cease to be fate. And so, Lady Philosophy says that whatever can be lost in an instant is not worth being attached to. Wealth, relationships, love, career and even life also fall under this category.
What’s left then? It is the quest for knowledge and wisdom, which fate can never take away. Genuine philosophers are indifferent to their fate and do not set up great reserves for what happens to them materially. roughly the message Consolation And we can guess why it became so popular. The Buddha and the Stoics had the same message and tried to live according to these principles.
I have the Penguin Black Classics edition translated by Victor Watts, whose introduction is just as interesting as the work. philosophy of consolation It was so popular that it was translated by many others, including Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth. It is accepted that Greek philosophy and science survived in Europe due to translations made by the Arabs, who took over the Library of Alexandria after the conquest of Egypt around AD 640. A century before that, Boethius had worked on classical texts and tried to popularize the study of Greek philosophy. Although it is his original work that has kept him on bookshelf for centuries.
Akar Patel is a columnist and translator of Urdu and Gujarati non-fiction works.