SOURCE: "Evil, Freedom, and Providence," in Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and philosophy, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1981, pp. 223-53.

In the following essay, Chadwick provides a detailed analysis of the Consolation of Philosophy, exploring such features of the work as its combination of Platonic and Stoic philosophies and its treatment of the problem of evil and free will.

Since the Renaissance, and especially since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century altered our understanding of the nature and structure of our environment, Boethius has come to seem a rather lonely and forgotten foreigner in a world grown strange. Yet something of that isolation belongs to him even during his lifetime, and never more so than in the near dereliction of the imprisonment during which he wrote the Consolation of philosophy. By common consent this remains one of the high masterpieces of European literature, translated since...