Boethius and Christian Philosophy

[nygothuey]

Ryan, though I am not a Christian, I appreciate your lectures immensley. I have a massive hunger for historical knowledge and through your videos I am learning much about church history and the wider events surrounding that history. Thank you very much for these wonderfully knowledgeable videos.

[PastorVor]

Eleven Thousand views and less than 100 likes. My guess is that a great many viewers are watching the playlist and going from vid to vid without taking the time to say....

Great show! Thanks!

[TheSharperSword]

What Boethius did in personifying philosophy is not unique, but quite similar to what king Solomon did in personifying Wisdom as a woman (see the first few chapters of Proverbs). If Boethius was a student of the Old Testament than surely he knew he was emulating Solomon.

[WelshRabbit]

Ryan, a minor nit: Once again, at 1:53 you show a pic of Henry of Bolingbroke (Henry IV of England, and Duke of Lancaster, or as I like to call him Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2, the usurper and co-conspirator in the starvation death of Richard II) when you refer to a completely different dude -- Henry IV (King of Navarre and and King of France -- the "Paris-is-worth-a-mass Henry" aka the Henry in the opening wedding scene of the movie "La Reine Margot" where the actor did a credible job of actually looking like Henri IV). Not only do the two Henry the IV's not look anything alike, their important acts are separated by nearly a century in time.

[hopelessstrlstfan]

Elizabeth, greatest Monarch of Eng.? Hmm, ask all of the Catholics killed simply because they desired to maintain the Faith of their fathers and the Faith which built Eng. This included great men like Thomas Moore. I give Dr. Reeves credit for the respect he pays to the thought of Boethius who was a Catholic philosopher. Many Protestants can't bring themselves to acknowledge anything good about Catholic individuals, Christian history before the protestant reformation, or philosophy. Good job, Professor.

[SKMikeMurphySJ]

“I suspect that beneath your offensively and vulgarly effeminate façade there may be a soul of sorts. Have you read widely in Boethius?"
"Who? Oh, heavens no. I never even read newspapers."
"Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age, " Ignatius said solemnly. "Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books."
"You're fantastic."
"I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he's found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

[ianburnnes-foote]

I have a couple of reservations about the information, but on the whole this was a very excellent presentation of the subject.

[Depipro]

One has to appreciate the impossible task that Boet(h)ius had set for himself: to try to somehow divine the Nature of God from a whole range of secondary sources. A lot of people throughout history have tried to come up with answers to these questions. Very few, if any, actually come from God himself, and therefore it should come as no surprise that they 1. try to personify/humanize God, and 2. contradict each other.

On a sidenote: Of course Boet(h)ius isn't unique in his attempts to reconcile the fundamentally contradictory. Another fundamental contradiction exists between the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. The latter does not discriminate between people based on their sex, background, ethnicity etc. The Good Samaritan is another example of that message from Jesus. On the other hand, the Ten Commandments start with an absolute state monopoly on religion (if we translate the First Commandment to modern language), it goes on to list "neighbour" as a juridical category (implying between the lines that it's not such a problem to do the things concerned to someone else), it legitimizes slavery (wife, servants and animals are all listed as property). Frankly, the whole idea of God having a "chosen people" is ridiculous. Why would He have bothered to create anyone else then? Also, think about what happens when a parent favours one child over the others. None of the children will be any better for that. (Note, though, that I am not holding this argument against the Jewish people. All peoples have these issues, the Jews just happened to be the best at writing them down and passing them on. We should all be grateful to them for that, for without this, we'd have had a lot harder a time understanding our own nature.)

That aside, Boet(h)ius being who and where he was, he had to think and write, and we should be grateful to him for it. I think that even if his work can't unravel God's Nature, it has surely contributed to understanding our own.

[christall-in-all]

Bloody Bess. That's how she she should have gone down in history.

[KTChamberlain]

I believe that a day for God is 2 billion years in our universe so times that by seven and you get 14 billion, which is how old our universe is approximately. Voila, problem solved with the whole "God created the world in 7 days."

[MrAlanfalk]

When people say God is this, or God is that, I can't help but wondering how they know. Why not several Gods, an evil God, a God who started everything and then stopped careing etc. People who claims to know anything about it NEVER have any valid or trustworthy arguments, and then they will build an entire life on it, or tell other people how to live acording to this illusion, it is sad, stupid and pretty tiresome 😩

[berylgreen]

What a convoluted, sludgy stew of sophistry poor old Boethius had to indulge in to reconcile his wacky, illogical religion with his perilous (and fatal) personal predicament.

But never mind. If we screwed up this world and are suffering, Jahweh still has his intelligent creatures on planet Katanutu VII-B, in the Andromeda Galaxy, who are doing just fine. He doesn't have to cry crocodile tears for them. He didn't even have to send one of his virgin-born sons to save them! Glory be!

But then there are the Belugesians of Nirdol, in the Ring Nebula … they're real wankers, that lot, and a right embarrassment to the Creator.