Boethius

Boethius’un Felsefenin Tesellisi Adlı Eserinde Tanrısal Öngörü, Kader Ve Zaman İlişkisi
The Relation Between Divine Providence, Fate and Time in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy

Özet
Boethius’un Felsefenin Tesellisi (Consolatio Philosophiae) adlı eseri şüphesiz en çok bilinen eserlerinden biridir. Bu metinde tanrısal öngörü, kader ve zaman arasında kurmuş olduğu bağlantı, zaman kavramına yaklaşımı sebebiyle oldukça önemlidir. Zaman insanların tabi olduğu fakat Tanrı’nın dahil olmadığı bir durumdur ve dolayısıyla tanrısal öngörü zamanın ötesindedir. Buna karşın tanrısal öngörünün insanlar üzerindeki hakimiyeti sürmektedir. Kader tanrısal öngörü ile insan arasındaki ilişkiyi sağlamaktadır fakat ne ölçüde insana seçim alanı bıraktığı tartışmalıdır. Sonsuz Tanrı her şeyi bir bütün olarak bildiğinden tanrısal öngörü zamanın ötesinde olmanın yanı sıra anlama gücünün bir sonucudur ve Tanrısal bilmenin sonuçlarından biridir. Boethius Tanrı’yı zamanın dışında konumlandırışı ile kendinden sonraki pek çok düşünürü etkilemiştir, kader ve tanrısal öngörü arasındaki bağı zaman görüşü ile farklı bir konuma taşımıştır.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Boethius, Tanrısal öngörü, kader, zaman, Tanrı

Abstract
Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy is without a doubt one of his most known books. Because of his approach to time, the connection between divine providence, fate and time is important. Time is something only humans are subjected to but not God, therefore providence is apart from time. Nevertheless, providence has authority on humans. Fate is the link between providence and humans, but it is problematic if humans have free will and to what extent. Since eternal God knows everything as a whole, providence is not only apart from time, but also a result of intelligence and of God’s cognition. Boethius’ stance in placing God out of time influences many other thinkers and separates the link between fate and providence.

Keywords: Boethius, divine providence, fate, time, God

The feast day of St. Cecilia has assumed a prominent place on the calendars of many a musician throughout the Christian world, as a matter of devotion and an opportunity for artistic celebration. In London, a series of fortuitous events gave rise to a brief but significant series of festivals in Cecilia’s honor, which enabled collaborations among the great composers and poets of the day. No work composed for these festivals has captured the imagination of its admirers like John Dryden's 1687 ode, "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day." This essay is a brief introduction to the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of this work, and a lyrical analysis of four significant settings by Giovanni Battista Draghi (c.1640–1708), George Frederic Händel (1685–1759), Norman Dello Joio (1913–2008), and Daniel Pinkham (1923–2006).

PART I PRAYER (has only one question) Using the following from my " Ratio, Preces, Intuitus: Prayer's Mediation in Boethius' Consolation " [posted both on the Brightspace and Academia.edu] to outline what must be considered, explain the nature (or natures), role (or roles), and purpose (or purposes) of prayer in in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.

Objections to the traditional view that God knows all of time eternally stand or fall on what one means by “eternally.” The widely held supposition, shared by both eternalists and those who oppose them, such as Open Theists, is that to say God knows all of time eternally entails that he cannot know all of time from a temporal perspective. In this paper I show that Boethius’s characterization of God’s eternal knowledge employs a different meaning of “eternal,” which is incompatible with this supposition. I argue that Boethius’s claim that “the most excellent knowledge is that which by its own nature knows not only its own proper object but also the objects of all lower kinds of knowledge” entails that God is not limited by perspective and so eternally and simultaneously knows every temporal event from a temporal as well as a timeless perspective.

The Old English Boethius boldly refashions in Anglo-Saxon guise a great literary monument of the late antique world, The Consolation of Philosophy. Writing from prison around 525 CE, Boethius turned to philosophy to transform his personal distress into a powerful meditation on fate, free will, and the human capacity for virtue in a flawed, fallen world. King Alfred and his hand-picked circle of scholars in ninth-century England recognized the perennial relevance of Boethius’s themes. They reshaped the Latin text into an Old English version that preserves the essence while accommodating a new audience: the Roman Fabricius, for example, becomes the Germanic weapon-smith Weland. The translation even replicated Boethius’s alternation of prose and verse—only in this case with Old English prose alternating with alliterative verse.

Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth each turned The Consolation of Philosophy into English, giving it an unrivalled pedigree of translators, but King Alfred was the first to bring it to a wider vernacular audience. Verse prologues and epilogues associated with the court of Alfred fill out The Old English Boethius, offering readers a fascinating glimpse of the moment when English confidently claimed its birthright as a literature capable of anything, from sublime ideas to subtle poetry.

"On the Consolation of Philosophy" by Boethius (d. 524) was arguably the second most widely read book of the Middle Ages after the Bible.  This two-volume study brings together for the first time all the surviving medieval musical notations added to the poetic portions of the work, which survive in manuscripts dating from the ninth through to the eleventh centuries.  The first volume comprises a detailed study of the sources, the development of new analytical techniques for assessing a musical tradition handed down largely in neumatic notation, a study of the melodic transmission and an account of historical context.  The second volume contains plates, transcriptions and commentaries for all the surviving notations presented first singly and then in comparative tables.  This comprehensive study is both an invaluable resource for performers and scholars interested in reconstructing an overlooked melodic tradition and a substantial contribution to understanding early medieval Latin song.

In these essays Peter Dronke looks at some of the relations between sacred and profane ideas and images, and Christian and pagan motifs, particularly in the early Middle Ages. The first two parts of the book dwell on aspects of (in the widest sense) Christian Platonism, the one part focussing on themes, the other on some of the greatest thinkers in the Latin world, from Boethius in the sixth century to Thierry of Chartres in the twelfth. The emphasis throughout is on transformations and syncretisms far more than disjunctions. The final group of essays is concerned with poetic texts, Latin and vernacular, in which non-sacred elements make their way into the sacred, the biblical and the saintly realms. A brief Epilogue glances at early medieval profane poetry outside as well as within Europe.

There are certain thoughts - intimations - that will seem corny, or laughable, and therefore dismissed - and only seriously absorbed into the changing mind when felt, in the shelter of the quietly moving music of the soul.
It is the function of art, and of love, to make this music heard . . . 

  It is not the music of depression - it is the way through.

The Musica speculativa of Jean des Murs played a key role in renewing interest in the teaching of Boethius in the fourteenth century. We argue that this treatise is much more than a summary of the Boethian De institutione musica in presenting its core teachings as fully consistent within an Aristotelian theory of knowledge. Two versions of its prologue (1323 and 1325 respectively) are examined together with their relationship to Jean’s Notitia artis musicae (1321) and the innovative significance of its mathematical-style presentation of the teaching of Boethius about proportions with its appeal to clear diagrams. We aim to guide the modern reader through the thought patterns and diagrams of Jean des Murs, demonstrating why the Musica speculativa was so widely studied in the later Middle Ages. The two different prologues are presented in English translation for the first time.

En la Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial
se conserva un texto manuscrito que recoge una traducción al castellano del De institutione musica de Boecio. Tanto el tipo de letra empleado, como cuestiones codicológicas, indican que este texto fue copiado en la segunda mitad del siglo xv. El tratado de Boecio es, sin ninguna duda, el referente teórico más importante para la música especulativa en el marco del quadrivium medieval y renacentista. En él, el autor tardorromano recoge las principales teorías helenísticas sobre ciencia armónica, siguiendo la estela de Nicómaco y Ptolomeo, y las sistematiza dentro de la disciplina música del quadrivium. La música para Boecio es una disciplina matemática que utiliza los procedimientos de la aritmética para demostrar «verdades» armónico-musicales. Por otra parte, esta traducción es la primera conservada a una lengua romance de este texto; las siguientes conocidas son dos traducciones al italiano realizadas ya en el último cuarto del siglo xvi. El manuscrito de El Escorial, por tanto, constituye un caso singular en la historia del texto boeciano. Presentamos un estudio preliminar del texto centrado en algunas cuestiones como: datación y posible origen de la traducción, diferentes manos intervinientes en la elaboración física del documento, traducción y transliteración de términos técnicos musicales.

PALABRAS CLAVE: Boecio, teoría musical, traducción, Biblioteca de El Escorial, quadrivium.

In the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial is preserved a Spanish translation of Boethius’ De institutione musica. The handwriting and other codicological issues suggest that the text was copied in the second half of the 15th century. Boethius’ treatise on music is the most important theoretical reference for speculative music of the medieval and renaissance quadrivium. In this text, the late-Roman author, following Nicomachus and Ptolemy, compiles the fundamental Hellenistic theories on harmonic science and systematizes them into the musica disciplina of the quadrivium. Music, according to Boethius, is a mathematical discipline which uses arithmetical procedures to prove musical-harmonic truths. This translation of Boethius’ De musica is the first one to a vernacular language that has come down to us, being the next ones two translations to Italian written in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The El Escorial manuscript is, then, a singular case in the history of the Boethian text. In this article we present a preliminary study of the text focused on such issues as: dating, possible origin, different participating hands in the document elaboration, translation and transliteration of musical terms.

KEYWORDS: Boethius, music theory, translation, El Escorial Library, quadrivium.

Convergences between Platonism and the Abrahamic Religions Parts 3, 4 & 5 Adapted for the De Li Non Aliud Reading Group 2021
Perspectives and Directions:
Light illuminates but blinds eyes accustomed to darkness. Darkness defeats eyes used to light but strengthens weak ones. The invisible enables visibility. That by which we see must be unseen—otherwise we would see only it.
This Powerpoint has been modified by additions to the texts from Plato and by adding material on and from Parmenides’ The Way of Truth and Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. Much has been deleted. The intention of additions and deletions is to give a greater number of the kinds of knowing in the Platonic tradition in order to assist your analysis, to bring out the kinds and functions of not knowing, and to emphasise the roles of not knowing and nothingness in philosophy, theology, and religion.
Plato is not perfectly consistent in describing the kinds of knowing and not knowing. In consequence reconciling his own texts with one another, and then extending the schema to include subsequent thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus, Bonaventure, and Cusa requires making difficult judgments.
If Fr Festugière is right, and I think he is, in the Platonic tradition not knowing goes together with knowing for at least two reasons. One is that knowing is also ignorance and alternates with ignorance. Another is that something other than knowing is operative: the desires or love for beauty, and the desires or love for the good beyond beauty, and union beyond good are also present. Alternatively or simultaneously there may be suffering in the sense of affectivity. The one who ascends is struck by or possessed by what is given. Dionysius writes of this pathos.

Magister Jacobus (c.1260 - c.1340) had as his purpose the revaluation of the "musica speculativa" tradition in the 14th century.  In his treatise "Speculum Musicae", he aimed to demonstrate how it could remain pertinent even when inserted into the Aristotelian and Thomist scholastic framework (associated with the thirteenth century). Magister Jacobus – in full congruence with the "liberal arts" pedagogical program and the " Itinerary of the Mind into God" program present in the philosophical and theological speculation of the Middle Ages –        considered the study of speculative music as an epistemological tool through which man could be introduced to the study of Philosophy and Theology. In this way, the mind could be led from the mirror of sensible things (including the "mirror of music") to the contemplation of invisible things, and above all to the contemplation of God.

An introduction to Middle English Literature, including: discussion of the historical context from Anglo-Norman period to the 14th Century, the development of the Middle English language, the medieval synthesis of Judeo-Christian faith and classical philosophy, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, and an analysis of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Truth" as representative of the medieval worldview.

It is not anachronistic to talk about the Self in medieval philosophy, but it is often a self without subjectivity. I look Boethius on the self as an ideal; Eriugena and the unknowable self; how Anselm avoids Augustinian ideas of self-knowledge; the extinction of the Avicennian self in Ibn Tufayl; and Aquinas's idea of self-knowledge without the self (in which I discuss some recent work by Therese Cory and Alain de Libera).

In 1887, Paul Tannery suggested that some ancient Pythagoreans defended a form of atomism against which Eleatic philosophers such as Zeno of Elea reacted. Later, Democritus and Leucippus on one hand, Plato on the other, developed atomistic intuitions in reaction to this old debate. No one would accept nowadays Tannery’s historical claim, but the philosophical content of his interpretation is still relevant for the history of atomism, especially for the Middle Ages. Indeed, according to Tannery the Pythagoreans defined atoms as points, i.e. the equivalent of units for numbers but with a position in space. This conception of a point was well known in the Middle Ages thanks to Boethius’ adaptation of Nicomachus of Gerasa’s Institutio arithmetica and other indirect sources (Macrobius, Martianus Capella, for instance) and was accepted by several philosophers and theologians. In this paper we try to follow the reception of this
concept from the 12th to the 14th century.

A smaller version of this paper was published as “Conversion: Ontological & Secular from Plato to Tom Jones”,  Numero Cinq, V: 7, July 2014  and is posted elsewhere on Academia.edu. Its aim is to present some features of conversion as represented over about twenty-five hundred years in the pagan and Christian west in a way which may prove illumining because not expected. Rather than looking at conversion as primarily a religious phenomenon, though not leaving this out, I shall mainly present it as psychic, ontological, and secular.  Moreover, although these three aspects can be seen together at almost every point, in order to bring out differences, I shall stress the psychological through Plato’s dialogues, the ontological through Neoplatonic – Peripatetic systems, and the secular through 18th and early 19th century novels of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Jane Austen. The elements touched on from Plato and his Late Ancient and Medieval successors will largely be determined by what is modified or suppressed by our cast of English novelists.
The major section on Jane Austen's novels is entitled "Secularization Completed and the Beginnings of a Critique." They are not the loss of conversion in the Christian Platonist tradition but rather such a complete passage into the processes of social and individual life, i.e. secularization, that religious forms need not be represented along side them. Jane Austen is a modern Sophocles in his difference from Euripides and Aeschylus. Indeed, there is a sense in which her novels are the deepest treatments of conversion in the genre.

Estudio sobre la proposición categórica asertórica, las inferencias inmediatas  y el silogismo categórico.  Texto fundamental para la historia de la lógica.  Tan vigente hoy como cuando fue escrito.  Con abundantes notas del traductor.
Study on categorical assertoric proposition, immediate inferences and categorical syllogism. Fundamental text in history of Logic.  Enriched with notes by the translator.

In several versions of " Introduction to Aristotle's Categories " (" The Isagoge ") we find very intriguing diagram of the "Tree of Porphyry". This diagram is closely linked with the square of opposition (logical square), natural tree with vegetative ornaments and the anthropomorphic figure. Porphyry took over Aristotle's division into five predicables (quinque praedicabilia) and defined them through five classes (species, genus, differentia, propria, accidentia) and from them he created scala praedicamentalis (Arbor Porphyriana). The Neoplatonic-Aristotelianism of Porphyry influenced the return of interest in Aristotle's logic in the Middle Ages through translations of Boethius and Al-Farabi. Their works of logic were the basis for the study of many topics, especially those related to theology. Later diagrams with the natural tree and human figure (syndesmos) are found in the 13th century in "Tractatus" (" Summulae Logicales ") written by Peter of Spain under different names such as: Tree of Love, Tree of Life, Tree of Science, Tree of Knowledge etc. Christian mysticism (Mystical theology), Islamic mysticism (Sufism) and Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah) was deeply influenced by Neoplatonic philosophy and within these mystical traditions we find different variations of the diagram aswell. Under the influence of the concept of Neoplatonic procession and reversion, mystic should be simultaneously involved in both Cataphatic and Apophatic theology to truly understand God. In other words, a spiritual person has to oscillate between affirming claims about the Tree of Life (the Being) and negation of those same claims to be able to have real knowledge of God.

It has become a commonplace to say that the Latin Fathers did not really hold a doctrine of deification. Indeed, it is often asserted that Western theologians have neglected this teaching, that their occasional references to it are borrowed from the Greeks, and that the Latins have generally reduced the rich biblical and Greek Patristic understanding of salvation to a narrow view of redemption. The essays in this volume challenge this common interpretation by exploring, often for the first time, the role this doctrine plays in a range of Latin Patristic authors.

The introductory essay on the Latin liturgy shows the wide-ranging use of deification themes in Latin worship, while the last one comparing the Greek and Latin Fathers provides the first serious study of the East and West's understanding of deification in light of substantial evidence. The essays in between explore the theology of deification in Perpetua and Felicity, Tertullian, Cyprian, Novatian, Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Peter Chrysologus, Leo the Great, Boethius, Benedict and Gregory. Together, these essays demonstrate that deification is a native part of early Latin theology which was consistently and creatively employed.

This volume on deification in the Latin Patristic tradition will be the beginning of a long-overdue conversation. It promises to stimulate further inquiry into the place deification holds in the grammar of Latin Patristic thought and its relation to the Greek tradition.