Boethius Famous Quotes

And no renown can render you well-known: For if you think that fame can lengthen life By mortal famousness immortalized, The day will come that takes your fame as well, And there a second death for you awaits.

Dante’s notions of sin are shaped largely by the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. In his famous Summa Theologiae, Aquinas argues that any evil action or sin is a form of self-destruction. He assumes that human beings have a nature that is supposed to be rational and good. Aquinas conceives of this nature, that of the rational animal, as being created by God specifically to pursue goodness, more specifically, the virtues. When a human being departs from this natural purpose, she injures herself, for she does what she was not intended to do. She wars against herself and her nature. Why does Aquinas hold this peculiar view of sin? One reason is because he accepts Boethius’ assertion that goodness and being are convertible. In other words, anything that exists has some goodness in it because God made it. And no matter how marred or broken or sinful that being is, it still maintains some goodness so long as it exists. According to this view, no one, not even Lucifer encased in ice at the bottom of Dante’s Inferno, is wholly evil. Evil can only feed off of goodness like a parasite; if all the goodness of a creature were eliminated, the creature in question would no longer exist.

Aristotle was the figure who dominated every part of the university curriculum, from Salerno and Toledo to Paris and Oxford and Louvain, from the seven liberal arts to medicine, law, and especially theology. Aristotle was, in the Arab phrase made famous by the poet Dante, “the Master of Those Who Know.” He was also the supreme teacher of all those who wanted to know. The standard way to learn any subject was first to read Aristotle’s own works on it line by line from cover to cover, then pore over the commentaries on the work by Boethius, Duns Scotus, Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas (whose works were rehabilitated when he was canonized in 1323). Finally, the student would write up his own series of quaestiones, or logical debating points, that seemed to arise from the text, and which were themselves reflections on past scholars’ debates on Aristotle.