SOURCE: "How to Read the Consolation of Philosophy," in Interpretation: A Journal of Bible & Theology, Vol. 14, Nos. 2-3, May-September, 1986, pp. 211-63.

In the following essay, written shortly before the critic's death in 1984, Curley analyzes the philosophical content, structure, and genre of the Consolation of Philosophy.

I. Introductory

Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, for centuries one of the most widely read and revered books in the West, is now little more than a historical curiosity. Most, but not all, educated people have heard of it; some have read it; very few seem to like it. But the reasons for the work's neglect are more significant than our common twentieth-century amnesia toward what one might term "the tradition". In the first place we are separated by a centuries-long tradition of philosophy from the intellectual context which gave rise to Boethius' synthesis of Plato and Aristotle. Minds such as Descartes and Kant...