The Enduring Consolation of Philosophy with Stephen Blackwood

“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 these harmonies reflect the reality of both the outer 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 this work seeks to instill cannot be induced by any other means. Instead, the liberating power of consciousness to which the book so insistently points depends on the innate freedom that we all possess—the very freedom to which Boethius endures, to this day, as a singular witness.

Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy is one of the many transformative texts featured in the curriculum of Ralston College’s MA in the Humanities. Applications for this degree program are now open. Apply at www.ralston.ac/apply.

Authors 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

– Chapters —

0:00 - Intro
01:11 - Why (and How) does the Consolation speak to us today?
03:15 - Part I: The Individual
04:41 - Victor Frankl & the depths of the self
09:07 - Boethius: the remedies of the self emerge from the self
11:27 - The poetic meters in the Consolation and their function
15:30 - On the self’s inner value & the search for the way home
19:34 - Part II: Truth and the Rational Order of Reality
20:34 - The Consolation’s argument & axiomatic understanding
23:30 - Progress, presentism, and perennial wisdom
25:04 - The ordered cosmos in Plato, Saint John, and Augustine
27:25 - Truth transcends schools, debates, and doctrines
29:29 - Part III: Pedagogy
32:21 - Beauty, poetry, and their place in the Consolation
34:33 - The relevance of the “whole soul” to our own time
36:26 - The rhetorical power of the opening of the Consolation
39:35 - Boethius and the recovery of freedom and human agency
42:37 - Freedom and the liberating power of consciousness
45:03 - AI and the urgency of reclaiming our own inner life
47:02 - Conclusion