“The Enduring Consolation of Philosophy” is the keynote lecture delivered by Dr Stephen Blackwood at the 2024 Symposium of Medieval and Renaissance studies. In this talk, commemorating the 1500th anniversary of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, Dr Blackwood shows why this work is more relevant than ever.

After takinging stock of the “meaning crisis” and our dire need for depth, Dr Blackwood meditates on the first great insight of the Consolation: that the remedies of the self must emerge from the self. The complex and intricate structures and patterns of Boethius’ work are powerful, beautiful, and therapeutic precisely because its harmonies reflect the reality of both the world and the world within.

Both the order of the cosmos and the order of the self unfold, for the reader of the Consolation, by way of the book’s carefully calibrated pedagogical dimension. Its therapies for the soul consist of tenderness and tough love alike, because the sight, insight, and assent that it seeks to instill cannot be induced by any other means. Instead, the liberating power of consciousness to which this work so insistently points depends on the innate freedom that we all possess—the very freedom to which the example of Boethius endures, to this day, as a singular witness.

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Authors, Artists, and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
The Consolation of Philosophy, H. F. Stewart & E. K. Rand, trans. (Loeb, 1918)
Alfred the Great, King of the Anglo-Saxons
Geoffrey Chaucer
Dante Alighieri
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Sir Thomas More
Queen Elizabeth I
C. S. Lewis
Pope Benedict XVI
Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Peter Abelard
Plato, Timaeus
Gospel of John
Saint Augustine of Hippo
Robert Crouse
Aristotle

The Enduring Consolation of Philosophy with Stephen Blackwood