SOURCE: An introduction to Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, edited by Margaret Gibson, Basil Blackwell, 1981, pp. 1-12.

In the following essay, Chadwick surveys Boethius's career and achievement, maintaining that "he taught the Latin West to judge the validity of an inference, to be aware of the foundations of mathematics, and to envisage reason and revelation as related but very distinct ways of apprehending the mystery of God."

By writing the Consolation of Philosophy Boethius provided all educated people of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance with one of their principal classics, a work of both intellectual profundity and literary delight to be read not only in Latin by clerks in their study but also by laymen at leisure, and therefore often in the vernacular. The author, it is true, wrote some pages on Christian theology which are of the greatest consequence. But he did not write them...