Consolation

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c. 477–524)

A dialogue with Wisdom herself, written in a death cell. She is still talking when it ends.

Catch rate: 53 / 255
Base research: 184
Stat total: 348

Base stats

Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.

Stamina72

Contend88

Defend90

Popularity98

Total348

Why these numbers

The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.

Stamina 72

Five books of prose and verse, written fast in a cell. Not a long book, and it never pretends the case is settled — Lady Philosophy is still arguing when the manuscript stops.

Contend 88

It argues wholly from reason, with nothing quoted from Scripture, because a condemned man reaching for consolation reached for what he could hold in the dark. It contends steadily rather than hard.

Defend 90

A high Defend, and earned: the book IS a defence — a mind under sentence of death, talked back to steadiness point by point, and fifteen centuries of readers have leaned on it and not broken it.

Popularity 98

Enormous Popularity. The most-copied secular book of the Middle Ages: King Alfred put it into English, so did Chaucer, so did Elizabeth I.

Cited for this book

Boethius wrote the Consolation in prison near Pavia in 524, waiting to be executed for a treason he did not commit. The book never names Christ, so Christians and non-Christians have both loved it for fifteen hundred years. His theological works show his faith plainly. God chose Abraham’s line so that “He might in the last days grant us His own Son to come to us, clothed in human form.”

Development

A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.

Consolation→
Lv 40

Boethius’ Corpus

Moves learned

By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.

Lv	Move	Type	Cat.	Pwr	Acc	PP
1	Speak Latin	History	Status	—	100%	5
1	God Is Happiness	Rationality	Argument	90	100%	10
1	Random Verse	Bible	Argument	10	100%	30
25	Affirm	—	Status	—	—	1
32	Argument from Desire	Natural Theology	Argument	74	100%	10
33	Chapter…	Bible	Scripture	—	—	12
34	The Wheel of Fortune	Experience	Argument	60	100%	20
36	The Still Centre	Rationality	Argument	75	100%	15
38	The Two Necessities	Rationality	Argument	90	100%	10
39	An Eternal Present	Theology Proper	Argument	95	95%	5

The quotes behind its moves

How to read these. In Scholar’s Dream, books argue with each other. Each thing a book can do in a debate is a move, and most moves carry a real quotation — the words the book puts on the table when it uses that move.

Strong against lists the opposing books and arguments a move was written to answer. Used against one of them, it hits much harder than usual: ×2 means twice the normal force, ×4 four times. It is the game’s way of saying: this is the sentence that answers that argument. Open an entry to read why.

“Then,” said she, “it is necessary to acknowledge that God is very happiness.” … “But we have also proved that God and true happiness are one and the same.”
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy III.10 (trans. H. R. James, 1897, public domain). (trimmed quote)public domain

God Is Happiness

RationalityArgument · power 90 · 100% accurate

In the gameThe last link of a chain: the source of all good can have nothing better than itself, so it is the highest good — and the highest good has already been shown to be happiness. Therefore God does not HAVE happiness. He is it.

“For in him we live, and move, and have our being. As some of your own poets have said.”
Acts 17:28 (WEB) — Paul at the Areopagus, quoting the Athenians’ own poets back to them.

Affirm

Status

In the gamePick the part of the opponent’s case that is true and affirm it. That point can no longer be used against you, and the opponent’s Defend falls sharply. It deals no damage. Affirm something false and you have only agreed with an error.

“…is not a happy life what all will, and no one altogether wills it not?… And this is the happy life, to rejoice to Thee, of Thee, for Thee; this is it, and there is no other.”
Augustine, Confessions 10.20–23 (trans. E. B. Pusey, 1838, public domain).public domain

“the desire of the true good is naturally implanted in the minds of men; only error leads them aside out of the way in pursuit of the false.”
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy III.2 (trans. H. R. James, 1897, public domain).public domain

Argument from Desire

Natural TheologyArgument · power 74 · 100% accurate

In the gameNobody has to be taught to want to be happy, and nothing on offer finishes the wanting. Augustine and Boethius, a century apart, both take the permanent hunger as evidence of where the food is.

Strong against

×4The Absurdan argument · why?

Camus grants the hunger and the silence, and calls their collision the absurd. Augustine and Lewis take the same hunger the other way. A hunger for something the world cannot supply is one of the ordinary signs that something else supplies it. Camus wrote his university thesis on Augustine.

×4Totem and Tabooan argument · why?

Freud explains where the longing came from. He never asks the other question — whether a longing this specific, appearing in every culture, is evidence that it has an object.

×2.5Platoa book · why?

Diotima’s ladder in the Symposium climbs from one beautiful body to all of them to beauty itself, because no particular thing ever finishes the wanting. Augustine makes that argument nearly eight centuries later and grants Plato every rung of it. What a Form cannot do is come looking for you.

×2Grace as Examplean argument · why?

Augustine found that nothing he chose could satisfy him until God changed what he loved. Grace did not only teach him. It changed his heart.

×2Penséesa book · why?

Pascal said that his account of man, wretched and great together, came from Augustine.

×2The Ethics of Beliefan argument · why?

A duty to believe only on proof is itself believed without proof — the rule cannot pass its own test!

“This is my art, this the game I never cease to play. I turn the wheel that spins. I delight to see the high come down and the low ascend.”
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy II.2 — Lady Philosophy speaking in the voice of Fortune (trans. H. R. James, 1897, public domain).public domain

The Wheel of Fortune

ExperienceArgument · power 60 · 100% accurate

In the gameFortune speaks in her own defence: the office, the money, the name — she lent them, and lending means taking back. Nothing she gave was ever the reader’s to lose.

“as the innermost of several circles revolving round the same centre approaches the simplicity of the midmost point… things are free from fate in proportion as they seek to come nearer to that central pivot.”
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy IV.6 (trans. H. R. James, 1897, public domain). (trimmed quote)public domain

The Still Centre

RationalityArgument · power 75 · 100% accurate

In the gameProvidence is the fixed centre; fate is the rim, turning. A thing is bound by fate exactly as far as it stands out from the centre — and freed as it is drawn in toward God.

“there are two necessities — one simple, as that men are necessarily mortal; the other conditioned, as that, if you know that someone is walking, he must necessarily be walking.”
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy V.6 (trans. H. R. James, 1897, public domain). (trimmed quote)public domain

The Two Necessities

RationalityArgument · power 90 · 100% accurate

In the gameGod’s foreknowledge no more forces an act than the reader’s watching a man walk forces his walking. “He must be walking, since I see him” binds nothing — and neither does the divine sight.

“eternity is the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment.”
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy V.6 (trans. H. R. James, 1897, public domain). The sentence Aquinas takes over whole.public domain

An Eternal Present

Theology ProperArgument · power 95 · 95% accurate

In the gameGod is not stretched out along time, remembering and waiting as the reader does. He holds the whole of unending life at once, in one present. That is what the word “eternal” means.

Strong against

×2.5Summa Theologiaea book · why?

Aquinas defends Boethius’s definition of eternity against the charge that it only says what eternity lacks (Summa I, q.10, a.1).

Read it: The Wheel That Spins

The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in Latin.

“This is my art, this the game I never cease to play. I turn the wheel that spins. I delight to see the high come down and the low ascend.”
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy II.2 — Lady Philosophy speaking in the voice of Fortune (trans. H. R. James, 1897, public domain).

“Then,” said she, “it is necessary to acknowledge that God is very happiness.” … “But we have also proved that God and true happiness are one and the same.”
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy III.10 (trans. H. R. James, 1897, public domain). (trimmed quote)

“as the innermost of several circles revolving round the same centre approaches the simplicity of the midmost point… things are free from fate in proportion as they seek to come nearer to that central pivot.”
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy IV.6 (trans. H. R. James, 1897, public domain). (trimmed quote)

“eternity is the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment.”
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy V.6 (trans. H. R. James, 1897, public domain). The sentence Aquinas takes over whole.

Notes

Written in prison near Pavia in 524, waiting to be executed for a treason he did not commit. He was beaten and killed before the year was out.

The book never names Christ, which is why Christians and non-Christians have both read it for fifteen hundred years. His signed theological tractates walk the Scriptural story straight.