How The Consolation of Philosophy drew on Confessions
A documented line of influence: Boethius demonstrably engaged Augustine of Hippo’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Confessions
Augustine of Hippo · c. 398
Ancient RomeThe influenced
The Consolation of Philosophy
Boethius · c. 524
Ancient RomeRelevance
7/10
On The Consolation of Philosophy’s page
- The spiritual-progress arc Boethius walks — from confusion toward clarity, soul addressing a higher truth — is patterned on Augustine's Confessions, books 1 through 7
- Boethius's famous definition of eternity as "unending life possessed all at once" is an elaboration of Augustine's meditation on time and the eternal present
- Read the Confessions first and you see the genre Boethius is working in: the inward turn made philosophical argument
On Confessions’s page
- Augustine's introspective ascent — turning inward, away from the senses, toward God — is the template Boethius writes in his own hand a century later
- Boethius leans on Augustine directly in his theology (his De Trinitate answers Augustine's like-titled work), and the Confessions' account of evil as the absence of good shapes the Consolation's reasoning on the same problem
- Where Augustine meditates on time and the eternal present, Boethius hardens it into a definition — God's eternity as "unending life possessed all at once" — and hands it to the Middle Ages