Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Consolation of Philosophy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Classical Philosophy and Medieval Christianity
Wisdom, Fortune, and Happiness
The Problem of Evil
Human Free Will and God’s Foreknowledge
Summary
Analysis
Boethius sings that he has fallen from his usual “joyful zeal” into a “weeping mode,” accompanied by the Muses who have inspired him since his “happy youth.” But now he is an elderly “worn out bone-bag hung with flesh,” and has to confront his own imminent death. Fortune has turned against him, which shows him that he—like all humans—was fundamentally “insecure” when he thought himself incorrigibly happy.
Medieval readers would have likely already known of the events that led Boethius to misery: although he previously held the high rank of magister officorium under the paranoid emperor Theodoric, the same emperor has now accused Boethius of treason and sentenced him to death because of his diplomatic work in Constantinople. Accordingly, Boethius’s “weeping mode” reflects his despair after this sudden fall from grace and his struggle to cope with his mortality. Although he depicts himself as very old, he is scarcely 40, and his lifelong project of translating Aristotle into Latin is about to be cut short. His reference to the Muses, the Greek goddesses of the creative arts, demonstrates the centrality of Ancient Greek philosophy to his worldview.
Themes
Switching to prose, Boethius notes that he finds “a woman standing over [him]” while he writes these lines. She is “awe-inspiring” because she is both impossibly old and full of youthful energy. She is somehow both “of average human size” and impossibly tall, and her clothes are made of “the finest thread woven with the most delicate skill,” but are old and neglected. On her hemline, Boethius sees the Greek letters Pi (Π) and Theta (Θ), with “a ladder of steps” between them, as though “her dress had been torn by the hands of marauders.” And she holds books and a scepter.
Boethius intentionally depicts his visitor—the illustrious Lady Philosophy—as somewhere between mortal and divine, a mediator between human experience and God’s realm, the cosmos. This reflects the way he believes reason and argument—the tools of philosophy—can help human beings understand the greater universe, as well as the esteem in which he holds the original Greek practitioners of philosophy. The letters Π and Θ unmistakably mark philosophy as a Greek endeavor and stand for its two halves: practical and theoretical reason, respectively. And Philosophy’s neglected and “torn” dress stands for the way those who came after the Greeks misinterpreted and misused their thought, taking pieces of it when it served their purposes rather than embracing its search for truth as a whole.
Themes
When she notices the Muses talking to Boethius, this woman grows furious and accuses them of making his illness worse by elevating “Passion” above “Reason.” Worse, Boethius isn’t a regular person, but rather a scholar “nourished on the philosophies of Zeno and Plato.” She calls the Muses “Sirens” and they leave the room, ashamed.The mysterious woman sits at the edge of Boethius’s bed.
Lady Philosophy’s conflict with the Muses symbolizes a conflict between art and philosophy, and specifically recalls Plato’s belief that art is a mere imitation of the truth, whereas philosophy grasps the truth directly. By reminding Boethius of his past philosophical study, Lady Philosophy both reminds him that his turn to art is a sign of weakness and establishes his authority to write on the subject of Greek philosophy in this book.
Themes
