Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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This is Book 4 of *Boece*, Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th-century Middle English prose translation of Boethius's *Consolation of Philosophy*, a philosophical dialogue in the Neoplatonic tradition. The narrator raises the problem of evil: if God governs all things and wills only good, why do the wicked prosper and the virtuous suffer unjustly? Lady Philosophy counters that this appearance is a deep illusion — the good are in truth always mighty, because they pursue sovereign good through the natural office of virtue and actually attain it, while the wicked are fundamentally weak, because they chase the same ultimate good through corrupt earthly means and perpetually fail to reach it. A central and distinctive move is the analogy of locomotion: just as walking upright on feet is more powerful than crawling on hands, using virtue to pursue the good is the "natural office," and the wicked's straining misdirection marks their essential impotence rather than their strength. The passage also contains an elevated lyric passage in which Philosophy promises to fit the narrator's thought with swift feathers so it may ascend through the spheres, past the stars and sun and Saturn, to the seat of God — framing philosophical enlightenment as a literal cosmic homecoming. For a reader weighing whether to read the full text, this excerpt showcases Chaucer's Boethius as a sustained philosophical argument about power, virtue, and providence, rendered in stately medieval prose with moments of genuine poetic ambition.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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