Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 21, 2025
In a later book Boethius gives a clearer key to the objection. He postulates four mental faculties: sensation possessed by oysters, imagination possessed by higher animals, reason possessed by man, intelligence possessed by God. Consequently man should aspire towards God instead of indulging his faculties of sensation and imagination, which he shares with the lower animals.
Boethius, the last of the Roman philosophers, left a work "on the Consolations of Philosophy," which is known in all modern languages. In many passages it is an imitation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In his didactic poems, known as the Bucolics, Virgil has made use of Theocritus, while in the Georgics he has chosen Hesiod as his model.
In spite of all these difficulties my only thought was how to escape, and as Boethius gave me no hints on this point I read him no more, and as I was certain that the difficulty was only to be solved by stress of thinking I centered all my thoughts on this one object.
He translated "Consolations of Philosophy" from the Latin of Boethius, a Roman senator of the sixth century, the most remarkable literary effort of the declining days of the Roman Empire, and highly prized in the Middle Ages.
Gibbon rightly amended his phrase, when he described Boethius not as stooping, but rather as rising, from his life of placid meditation to an active share in the imperial business. That he held this sound opinion is quite as plausible an explanation of Voltaire's anxiety to know persons of station and importance, as the current theory that he was of sycophantic nature.
It was with himself rather than with his reader that he communed as thoughts of the foe without, of ingratitude and opposition within, broke the calm pages of Gregory or Boethius. "Oh, what a happy man was he," he cries once, "that man that had a naked sword hanging over his head from a single thread; so as to me it always did!" "Desirest thou power?" he asks at another time.
"You are right," said my good master; "it is a bad light, and I am somewhat displeased over it, less because I cannot play cards than because I have a desire to read a few pages of the 'Consolations' of Boethius, of which I always carry a small edition, so as to have it handy when something unfortunate overcomes me, as has been the case this day.
Nevertheless, after some time, my mind, reasoning with itself to heal itself, took heed, since neither my own nor that of another availed to comfort it, to turn to the method which a certain disconsolate one had adopted when he looked for Consolation. And I set myself to read that book of Boethius, not known to many, in which, when a captive exile, he had consoled himself.
The last rays of heathen cultivation in Italy were extinguished in the gloomy dungeon of Boethius, and the period so justly designated as the Dark Ages began both in eastern and western Europe. In Italy, the triumph of barbarism was more sudden and complete.
On the one hand he chooses for the benefit of the clergy whom he desired to reform, the "Pastoral Care" of the good Pope, Gregory the Great, the author of the mission which had converted England to Christianity; but on the other hand he chooses the "Consolations of Philosophy," the chief work of Boethius, the last of the Romans, and the victim of the cruel jealousy of Theodoric.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking