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
In closing, Philosophy emphasizes that she is not “rigidly opposed to Fortune,” because sometimes Fortune is helpful—but only bad fortune, which teaches people the truth and “enlightens” them about “how fragile a thing happiness is.” In Boethius’s case, misfortune has shown him who his real friends are—the ones who have stood by him during his public persecution.
While Philosophy has already emphasized that Fortune is neither good nor bad, but merely irrelevant, here she appears to start saying the same thing and then suddenly turn around and say the opposite: misfortune is good for people because it leads them to wisdom. While her argument makes sense in and of itself, readers might wonder whether this reversal of common sense indicates that Philosophy might have gone too far—and that either Boethius has missed an important flaw in her reasoning, or logic and argument are not as infallible as he hopes them to be.
Themes
In verse, Philosophy sings of a series of paradoxes that demonstrate how “constant change” and “harmony” are two sides of the same coin. For instance, “the tides […] confine the greedy sea.” She sees this as proving that the universe is held together by Love. Love “holds peoples joined” together and is also the basis of true friendship. If only, she exclaims, people were “rule[d]” by love, like the world is!
Just as the metaphor of Fortune’s wheel relies on opposites complementing one another in the grand scheme of things, this set of images reminds readers that what humans experience as “constant change” is really the repetition of established cycles in the world. Philosophy calls this complementarity “Love,” and suggests that it has something to do with true wisdom.
Themes
