He views it as one of a number of literary experiments of late antiquity, taking its place alongside Augustine's Confessions and Soliloquies as a spiritual meditation, as an attempt by Boethius to speak objectively about the life of the mind and its relation to God. He argues that it is a Christian work dramatizing not the truths of philosophy as a whole, but the limits of pagan philosophy in particular. Relihan delivers a genuinely new reading of the Consolation. The conventional reading of the Consolation is that it is a defense of pagan philosophy nevertheless, many readers who accept this basic argument find that the ending is ambiguous and that Philosophy has not, finally, given the prisoner the comfort she had promised. Her offer to teach him who he truly is and to lead him to his heavenly home becomes a debate about how to come to terms with evil, freedom, and providence. In the Consolation, an unnamed Boethius sits in prison awaiting execution when his muse Philosophy appears to him. 480-524) is best known for the Consolation of Philosophy, one of the most frequently cited texts in medieval literature.
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