The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy
The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy gathers the major prose of Boethius, a Roman statesman and scholar executed around 524 A.D. The centerpiece, the Consolation, was written in prison as he awaited death on charges of treason against Theodoric the Ostrogoth. There, stripped of office, wealth, and his beloved library, he is visited by Lady Philosophy, who through a dialogue of reasoned argument and verse leads him from despair toward understanding of fortune, happiness, providence, and the highest good. The five shorter Tractates apply the same rigor to Christian doctrine, on the Trinity, on Christ, and against heresy.
Together these works show why Boethius is called the last of the Roman philosophers and the first of the scholastic theologians. He keeps philosophy and theology in their separate orders, yet both seek truth through reason. Profoundly influential on the Middle Ages, the Consolation remains a timeless meditation on suffering, fate, and consolation.
How it begins
In preparing the text of the Consolatio I have used the apparatus in Peiper's edition (Teubner, 1871), since his reports, as I know in the case of the Tegernseensis, are generally accurate and complete; I have depended also on my own collations or excerpts from various of the important manuscripts, nearly all of which I have at least examined, and I have also followed, not always but usually, the opinions of Engelbrecht in his admirable article, Die Consolatio Philosophiae des Boethius in the Sitzungsberichte of the Vienna Academy, cxliv. (1902) 1-60. The present text, then, has been constructed from only part of the material with which an editor should reckon, though the reader may at least assume that every reading in the text has, unless otherwise stated, the authority of some manuscript of the ninth or tenth century; in certain orthographical details, evidence from the text of the Opuscula Sacra has been used without special mention of this fact. We look to August Engelbrecht for the first critical edition of the Consolatio at, we hope, no distant date. The text of the Opuscula Sacra is based on my own collations of all the important manuscripts of these works. An edition with complete apparatus criticus will be ready before long for the Vienna Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum .
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.