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By Root 3525 0

God, he says, are both the chiefest good, and are therefore identical. 'Men are made happy by the obtaining of divinity.' 'They who obtain divinity become gods. Wherefore every one that is happy is a god, but by nature there is only one God, but there may be many by participation.' 'The sum, origin, and cause of all that is sought after is rightly thought to be goodness.' 'The substance of God consisteth in nothing else but in goodness.' Can God do evil? No. Therefore evil is nothing, since God can do everything. Virtuous men are always powerful, and bad men always weak; for both desire the good, but only the virtuous get it. The wicked are more unfortunate if they escape punishment than if they suffer it. 'In wise men there is no place for hatred.'

The tone of the book is more like that of Plato than that of Plotinus. There is no trace of the superstition or morbidness of the age, no obsession with sin, no excessive straining after the unattainable. There is perfect philosophic calm—so much that, if the book had been written in prosperity, it might almost have been called smug. Written when it was, in prison under sentence of death, it is as admirable as the last moments of the Platonic Socrates.

One does not find a similar outlook until after Newton. I will quote in extenso one poem from the book, which, in its philosophy, is not unlike Pope's Essay on Man.

If Thou wouldst see

God's laws with purest mind,

Thy sight on heaven fixed must be,

Whose settled course the stars in peace doth bind,

The sun's bright fire

Stops not his sister's team,

Nor doth the northern bear desire

Within the ocean's wave to hide her beam.

Though she behold

The other stars there crouching,

Yet she incessantly is rolled

About high heaven, the ocean never touching.

The evening light

With certain course doth show

The coming of the shady night,

And Lucifer before the day doth go.

This mutual love

Courses eternal makes,

And from the starry spheres above

All cause of war and dangerous discord takes.

This sweet consent

In equal bands doth tie

The nature of each element

So that the moist things yield unto the dry.

The piercing cold

With flames doth friendship heap

The trembling fire the highest place doth hold,

And the gross earth sinks down into the deep.

The flowery year

Breathes odours in the spring,

The scorching summer corn doth bear,

The autumn fruit from laden trees doth bring.

The falling rain

Doth winter's moisture give.

These rules thus nourish and maintain

All creatures which we see on earth to live.

And when they die,

These bring them to their end,

While their Creator sits on high,

Whose hand the reins of the whole world doth bend.

He as their king

Rules them with lordly might.

From Him they rise, flourish, and spring,

He as their law and judge decides their right.

Those things whose course

Most swiftly glides away

His might doth often backward force,

And suddenly their wandering motion stay.

Unless his strength

Their violence should bound,

And them which else would run at length,

Should bring within the compass of a round,

That firm decree

Which now doth all adorn

Would soon destroyed and broken be,

Things being far from their beginning borne.

This powerful love

Is common unto all,

Which for desire of good do move

Back to the springs from when they first did fall.

No worldly thing

Can a continuance have

Unless love back again it bring

Unto the cause which first the essence gave.

Boethius was, until the end, a friend of Theodoric. His father was consul, he was consul, and so were his two sons. His father-in-law Symmachus (probably grandson of the one who had a controversy with Ambrose about the statue of Victory) was an important man in the court of the Gothic king. Theodoric employed Boethius to reform the coinage, and to astonish less sophisticated barbarian kings with such devices as sun-dials and water-clocks. It may be that his freedom from superstition was not so exceptional in Roman aristocratic families as elsewhere; but its combination with great learning and zeal