By Faryn Thomas, Jennifer Morse, Joseph Marques, and Robert Carhuayo God’s divine goodness and beauty are often mentioned in the same breath. But there are other things that are somewhat surprisingly portrayed as beautiful, for example, Sodom. “The people’s settlements there were beautiful — the men without honor, hateful to their creator” (137) The Sodomites are obviously without any sort of goodness or grace, and…
Why must we obey God? Is it because we want to, or because we need to? For those of us who were raised Christian, or at least influenced by Christian tradition, we were taught to obey God, that God is all-loving, that he has a plan for each of us, and that he knows best. However, in revisiting Genesis, not much is offered by the text regarding God’s loving nature…
(Group 6) Reading Genesis A and B in light of the conversation we had on Tuesday, we were quite interested in the idea of Angel’s being fallible and capable of evil, and the way that the text uses light and dark so heavily to contrast good vs. bad, life vs death, and God’s sight vs what is not being seen. Particularly because angels are often conceived of as being more…
One of the throughfares between The Consolation of Philosophy and “The Differend,” is a concern with illegibility. The Consolation closes on Lady Philosophy’s final argument, in which she asserts that Boethius misinterprets God’s providence as pre-vision because he is bound to the human conception of linear time. God, whereas, experiences all time at once. To try to comprehend God’s mode of being and experience of time as a human is…
A question or concern I had with Boethius, and a question I seem to have when analyzing any religious or moral text which is trying to argue a particular position, is the question of blind faith. With Boethius, as with many other texts, the reader encounters beautifully written and well thought out arguments in favor of the idea that the wicked are always punished, for example. Arguments such as this…
The juxtaposition between the prose and poetry is quite interesting, and I wonder what boundaries it sets in terms of the subject matter. What’s particularly interesting is the incongruity between Lady Philosophy’s words at the beginning–the muses “will only make [Boethius’s] condition worse”–with Boethius’s continued interest in poetic forms (4). Do the boundaries between the poetry and the prose change throughout the text as Boethius explores different forms of consolation?…
By Faryn Thomas, Jennifer Morse, Joseph Marques, and Robert Carhuayo If evil men have lost their human nature (118), do they still have a will in them left that drives them towards the good (110)? Lady Philosophy explains to Boethius that “any human action presupposes two things: will and ability” (109). She then goes on to say “that the whole effort of man’s will, which is vital in his activities,…
Seeing hell for oneself, watching the torture of a saint, looking at illustrations of war: these profoundly terrible experiences, narrated and drawn, shaped the way medieval readers took in the world around them, its violence, its suffering, its preponderance of evils. But how exactly does literature allow readers to witness and process such horrors? How is the observation of violence transformed by art? What is unique about the medieval experience…
