Boethius
Boethius was a Roman of noble family and the first major philosopher-theologian after the fall of the Western Empire in 476. In his youth he wrote handbooks on mathematics and music and set out to translate all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin. He never finished, but his translations of Aristotle’s logical works made them available in the West for centuries.
He served the Gothic king Theodoric, whom he had hoped would become the philosopher-king of Plato’s ideal. About 523 he was imprisoned on a charge of treason, the details of which are unknown, and he was executed in 524. In prison he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue in which Lady Philosophy comforts him with the wisdom of the Greeks and reminds him that virtue matters more than fortune.
Boethius was an unorthodox thinker, and the Consolation speaks more of philosophy than of Christ. Yet it was among the most widely read books of the Middle Ages.1
His Legacy
Boethius has been called the “Last of the Romans, first of the scholastics.” His Latin Aristotle supplied the logic of the medieval schools, and through Anselm, Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas that logic became the frame of Roman Catholic theology, until the Reformers challenged the rule of Aristotle over the reading of Scripture.2
