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or provincial, the servant of the Universe and of the Light that kindles it, of "the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars." There is no one to be compared with his influence. Middle Ages, distinct from that of all the Doctors of the Church, though acknowledged and honoured by them; a strain of philosophy that would not strive nor cry, a gentle ghost whose presence is recognised in its effect on many minds, persuading them to think wisely about the old commonplaces of Death and Time. It is a spirit of freedom and of courage, unlike the freedom and courage of the Northern fighting temper, and not wholly Christian either, not Christian at all in any confessed or open manner; but as indomitable in its own way as the Northern gods, and as quiet as the first of the Christian martyrs. Boethius in his prison meditations has repeated the lessons and the temper of the Phado and the Apology, and his great work was to give to the Western world a sermon that answered the questions of Christendom in the spirit of Plato. Being admirably clear, and almost as free from technical philosophy as from theological dogma, the Consolation was accepted everywhere on its own merits. It was not Christian enough to be heretical, and it had not the pretensions of the philosophical sects; it aroused no jealousies in the Schools.

Boethius was fortunate in the time of his life and death, and in the choice of his theme. No other writer commands so much of the past and future. Between the worlds of ancient Greece and modern

The Consola

Europe, he understands not merely their points of contact, the immediate and contemporary tion of turmoil of Germany and Rome; he rePhilosophy. members the early thoughts of Greece, long before the Stoic and Epicurean professors whom he disliked, and he finds the response to his signals not in the near future only but far off in the distant centuries: it is commonplace, no doubt, but of a sort that finds its way into some of the noblest passages in literature. Boethius is remembered and his words are quoted by Dante in the meeting with Francesca, and again in the concluding phrase of the Paradiso; it is a small thing in comparison with this honour that Dante should have modelled his Convito, a philosophical treatise, on the Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius has been traced in English literature from Beowulf to Hamlet and Lycidas. "The last infirmity of noble mind" is a quotation, and Hamlet is thought to have had in his tablets, somewhere, Adeo nihil est miserum nisi cum putes. The list of translators, including King Alfred, Notker the German, Jean de Meun, Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth, with many more, gives no complete account of his influence, though it proves sufficiently that Boethius was secure against all changes of taste. Perhaps if one were to choose any single piece of evidence to show what his reputation was, it would be a passage quoted from the letters of Ser Lapo Mazzei, a Florentine notary of the end of the fourteenth century: Ser Lapo speaks of the Consolation as a work of "highest philosophy," though "to-day simple people hold it cheap, because

it is a common book for the youngest pupils in our schools." The reason of his popularity and the distinguishing quality of his work is that he saw what was essential and rejected what was technical and accidental, in this his latest book. In his other writings he had laboured in another way, as his old biographers tell.2..

The works of Boethius in Logic, Music, and the other arts belong to the common educational business of the time. The dissertation De Sancta Trinitate, not to speak of the other theological writings attributed to Boethius, is equally professional. But the Consolation of Philosophy, written in the prison at Pavia, is free from all the restrictions of system and school methods. Its want of Christianity has perplexed the more recent

1 "Oggi da' semplici accetto per vile perchè si legge a corso in ogni scuola ai più giovani" (A. D'Ancona, Varietà storiche e letterarie, serie seconda, p. 202). Mazzei read the Gospels, the Epistles of St Paul and St Jerome, and "el bel libretto di frate Jacopo da Todi." What use he made of his Boethius and other moral teachers may be seen in the following sentence, too good to be left out, against the temptation of playing at Providence : "Compare, non vogliate voi esser quegli che voglia racconciare il mondo; ma lasciate audare il mondo come Dio l'ordinò, e ciò è che la ruota volgesse sempre; e attendete a governare voi, e le cose che Dio v'ha prestate. La cosa va pur così; andate colla voga."

2 Multos libros de græco in latinum transtulit. Fecit commentum super ysagogas .i. introductiones Aristotelis. Edidit et aliud super Porphyrii periermenias .i. interpretationes quod divisit in duo volumina. Quorum alterum analitica .i. resolutoria appellavit ubi omnes syllogismi rethoricæ artis resolvuntur. Composuit musicam quam transtulit de Pithagora et Ptolomeo græcis nec non etiam arithmeticam cujus partes sumpsit de Nicomacho. Fecit et alios libros perplures.

commentators, but not those who called Boethius their master. The whole plan of the book excluded everything that was formal, and the disuse of Christian terms is hardly more surprising than the omission of Aristotle. The great Aristotelian interpreter was not here engaged in strict philosophical discussion.

Boethius in the Consolation writes as if he had foreseen the distress that was to come from technicalities The Platonic and from the "vermiculate questions" of tradition. the schoolmen, as if he had known in his own mind the weariness of systematic philosophy and theology which was to be felt so keenly and expressed so strongly by More and Erasmus. He is led instinctively, while waiting for the summons of the executioner, to look for the point of view from which the most important things are made manifest. There was no time for elaborate work in details. His purpose was to explain as well as he could in short space the philosophical ideas that were of greatest moment as a preparation for death. The book is not philosophy but consolation. It is popular, it is meant for the weaker brethren. The beauty of it, which lifts it far above the ordinary run of reflections on mortality, is that it restores a Platonic tradition, or even something older and simpler in Greek philosophy, at a time when simplicity and clearness of thought were about to be overwhelmed in the medieval confusion. Boethius saved the thought of the Middle Ages. His protection was always to be

had by any one who found the divisions and distinctions of the schools too much for him. In the Consolation of Philosophy there was a place of outlook from which the less valuable matters sank back to their proper place, and the real outlines of the world were brought into view.

Boethius went back to Plato because he required more metaphysical aid for his moral theory than he could find in the Nicomachean Ethics, and much less of the details of the practical life. He was not concerned with ordinary right conduct; he was a seeker after a vision by which the moral nature should be regenerate, when the goodness of man should be shown to be none other than that which maintains the universe, and preserves the stars from wrong.

The end of man is to see that there is nothing in the world that is not divine-nothing absurd, nothing unintelligible, nothing merely natural. Plato had said in the Timaus: "There are two kinds of causes, the Divine and the Necessary, and we must seek for the Divine in all things, and the Necessary for the sake of the Divine." The "necessary" here means what is mechanical or natural-the "second causes" of later popular philosophy. This is the doctrine taken up and expounded in the Consolation, and on this everything depends. Faith or vision-it matters little what it is called-is with Boethius the chief end; from that comes all the rest; the man who has that is unassailable. Morality thus depends on intelligence, on contemplation; the deadliest error is to misinterpret the

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