CLT Practice Test 3

Philosophy/Religion

¹This passage is an original essay written for PrepBanq practice.

²Around the year 524, a Roman senator named Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius sat in a prison cell near Pavia, awaiting execution. Only a few years earlier he had been among the most honored men in Italy. Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king who ruled Italy from Ravenna, had made him master of offices, and in 522 the list of honors given to his family [1] were extended when both of his young sons were named consuls in the same year. Then, accused of treason and of practicing forbidden arts, Boethius lost everything: his office, his property, and finally his freedom.

³Boethius had long devoted his leisure to an ambitious project: he hoped to translate all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin and to show that the two philosophers largely agreed. He completed only part of the [2] plan, his translations of Aristotle's logical works became standard textbooks in the schools of medieval Europe. In prison, however, he turned from translating the works of others to writing a book of his own, The Consolation of Philosophy.

⁴The book opens with the prisoner composing mournful verses. Suddenly a woman of stern and ageless beauty appears beside his bed. She is Philosophy herself, and her robe has been torn by quarrelsome schools of thinkers, each of which carried off a scrap of it. She drives away the Muses of poetry, who have only been feeding his grief, and begins to treat him as a physician treats a patient. Her first aim is not to change his circumstances but to [3] effect his outlook.

⁵Philosophy's first lesson concerns Fortune. Fortune, she explains, has never promised to stay with anyone; constancy is simply not part of [4] their character. Her wheel never stops turning, and those who ride it to the top must expect to come down again. [5] However, the prisoner has no right to protest, since he accepted Fortune's gifts for years without objecting to her habit of change.

⁶From this beginning, Philosophy leads her student upward. Wealth, fame, and power, she shows, are goods that can be taken away, and a happiness that can be [6] lost—however pleasant it may be—cannot be the highest happiness. True happiness must be complete and self-sufficient, and Philosophy argues that such a good can be found only in God. [7] Honestly, the whole book is kind of a pep talk with a bunch of big ideas thrown in.

⁷The Consolation also takes up a puzzle that has troubled readers ever since: if God knows in advance everything that will happen, how can human choices be free? Philosophy answers that God does not foresee events the way a person guesses at the future. God lives in an eternal present and sees all of time at once, much as a person watching someone walk across a field knows that the walk is happening without forcing it to happen. [8] God's knowledge, in the same way, leaves human choices free.

⁸Boethius's book outlived both [9] it's author and the kingdom that condemned him. King Alfred the Great translated it into Old English in the ninth century, Geoffrey Chaucer rendered it into Middle English, and Queen Elizabeth I produced her own version in 1593. [10] For more than a thousand years, readers who were suffering have turned to it again and again, repeatedly, finding in its pages comfort and consolation in difficult times when they were suffering.