Of a deep significance, in view of the total historical movement, is the philosophical teaching of the last member of the ancient Roman world who exhibited philosophical capacity—the long famous Boethius, minister of the conqueror Theodoric, who put him to death in the year 525. Ostensibly from the same hand we have the De Consolatione Philosophiae, which is substantially non-Christian, and a number of treatises expounding orthodox Christian dogma. In the former “we find him in strenuous opposition ... to the Christian theory of creation; and his Dualism is at least as apparent as Plato’s. We find him coquetting with the anti-Christian doctrine of the immortality of the world, and assuming a position with regard to sin which is ultra-Pelagian and utterly untenable by a Christian theologian. We find him, with death before his eyes, deriving consolation not from any hopes of a resurrection ... but from the present contempt of all earthly pain and ill which his divine mistress, ‘the perfect solace of wearied souls,’ has taught him.”[141] Seeing that Theodoric, though a professed admirer of the ancient life, had absolutely put down, on pain of death,[142] every remaining religious practice of paganism, it is certain that Boethius must have officially professed Christianity; but his book seems to make it certain that he was not a believer. The only theory on which the expounder of such an essentially pagan philosophy can be conceived as really the author of the Christian tractates ascribed to Boethius is that, under the stroke of undeserved ruin and unjust doom, the thinker turned away from the creed of his official life and sought healing in the wisdom of the older world.[143] Whether we accept this solution or, in despite of the specific testimony, reject the theological tractates as falsely ascribed—either by their writer or by others—to Boethius,[144] the significant fact remains that it was not the Christian tracts but the pagan Consolation that passed down to the western nations of the Middle Ages as the last great intellectual legacy from the ancient world. It had its virtue for an age of mental bondage, because it preserved some pulse of the spirit of free thought.
[1] [Mt. xxii, 39]; [Mk. xii, 31]. [↑]
[2] Talmud, tract. Sabbath, 306. [↑]
[5] See the impressive argument of Dr. Moncure Conway in his Solomon and Solomonic Literature, 1899, ch. xviii. [↑]
[6] See Dr. Nicholson’s The Gospel According to the Hebrews, 1879, p. 77. Cp. Conway, p. 222. Dr. Nicholson insists that at least the word “sacrificing” must be spurious, because “it is surely impossible that Jesus ever uttered this threat”! [↑]
[7] Cp. the author’s Christianity and Mythology, pt. iii. div. ii, § 6. [↑]
[8] The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, known as the “Slavonic Enoch,” ch. xliv, 1 (Eng. tr. 1896, pp. 60, 67). [↑]