Boethius and the Problem of Universals

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c. 477-524), a Roman senator and consul under the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, was imprisoned at Pavia on a charge of treason and executed without trial, probably in 524. While awaiting execution, he composed his masterpiece, The Consolation of Philosophy, a prosimetrum alternating prose arguments with verse meters, in which a personified Lady Philosophy visits the despairing prisoner and leads him, through dialectical argument, from grief over the injustice of Fortune to a rational understanding of true happiness. Book II analyzes Fortune's wheel, arguing that the goods she gives and takes away, wealth, honor, power, and fame, are inherently unstable and cannot constitute genuine happiness, since happiness must be a self-sufficient and stable good. Book III concludes that true happiness (beatitudo) can be found only in the highest good itself, which Philosophy identifies with God, echoing Platonic and Neoplatonic themes even as the work, remarkably, never explicitly cites Christian scripture or the person of Christ despite being written by a man who had also composed technical treatises on the Trinity.