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 expresses his agreement with Philosophy’s argument and says that he hopes to “be able to see God.” Philosophy reminds him that “full and perfect good” requires the unity of “sufficiency […], power, reverence, glory and pleasure.” Indeed, these five things only “become good” when they are united, but everything is only good “through participation in goodness,” which means “unity and goodness are identical.”
Philosophy’s argument about unity and goodness is somewhat roundabout and can be quite confusing at first. To fully understand what she is doing here, her points must be broken down in more detail. First, she uses a premise she has already proven: “perfect good,” meaning God, has all five dimensions of happiness, all united together. Secondly, when they are not all united, these five things are not good and lead to misery instead. So these things only “become good” when they have “unity.” But, her third premise goes, all things only become good when they have “goodness.” The term “participation” is a difficult concept from Plato, but essentially, when Boethius says that anything is good only “through participation in goodness,” he means that every good thing is good because it “has” some abstract quality called “goodness.” Since this argument applies to everything that is good, it also applies to the five dimensions of happiness, which must also only be good if they “participate in” or have goodness. But Philosophy has already argued that these five dimensions of happiness become good because they have unity. If these five things are good when they have unity and when they have goodness, then having unity and having goodness are simply the same thing, which leads to her final point here: “unity and goodness are identical.”
Themes
Having explained why unity is the same as goodness, Philosophy argues that “everything that is” exists only when “it is one,” and by “dissolv[ing …] ceases to be one.” She explains this point through the metaphor of the body and soul: they constitute “a living being” when united, but this “living being perishes and no longer exists” when body and soul are separated. She holds that everything is like this: existing only as long as it has unity. Everything living—including “plants and trees”—seeks to maximize its life and reproduce. Stone, water, air, and fire are like this, too, Philosophy argues: stone resists being broken, water and air “reunite” when separated, and fire cannot “be[] cut at all.” For all beings this self-preservation is a natural instinct, not a conscious decision.
According to Philosophy, unity is not only goodness, but also the essence of all existence itself, from living beings like humans to inanimate things like rocks and fire. And this essence of existence is also equivalent to the desire to reproduce or otherwise create more of one’s own kind. The fact that this desire for unity and reproduction is an instinct means that it is something already built into things’ inherent nature from the beginning—it is not a matter of free will. Since it is a natural instinct, in turn, it is inevitable: everything has it. Philosophy implies (but does not yet say outright) that God put this instinct in things, since He supposedly created everything. Luckily for the reader, the purpose of all this seemingly circular argumentation will soon become clear.
Themes
Next, Philosophy combines her previous arguments. First, as she has just argued, existing means being in unity, and everything desires its self-preservation, so therefore “all things desire unity.” Moreover, “unity is identical with goodness,” and so “it is goodness itself which all things desire.” Boethius agrees, and Philosophy tells him that he has found “the central truth” about the final goal of everything that exists: “goodness” itself.
Although this argument might appear even more cryptic and disconnected from reality than before, what Philosophy eventually wants to say—and will soon make clear—is that everything naturally desires a return to God, the Creator of all things, whom she has already shown to be the same as “goodness itself.” But, for now, her point answers two important contextual questions that Boethius never knew he needed to ask: what do “all things” want, and why should things be good rather than evil? The answer to both these questions is that everything that exists has a natural instinct to desire goodness.
Themes
Philosophy sings that anyone who “deeply searches out the truth” will ultimately find that truth “hidden deep within” oneself, in one’s natural instincts. Through philosophical “teaching,” one can “recall” this buried truth.
Philosophy’s song directly refers to her above conclusion—through her “teaching,” Boethius has learned to “recall” his inherent desire for goodness, which he shares with everything else in the universe. But this song is also another direct reference to Plato, who believed that the soul already has complete knowledge of everything before it enters the body, but needs to be reminded of that knowledge and forced to “recall” it through education (specifically, through philosophical dialogues). In fact, much of the opacity and confusion in this section of Boethius’s text comes from his attempt to closely follow Plato’s train of thought.
Themes
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