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 tells Philosophy that he “agree[s] very strongly with Plato,” and that he has learned this same lesson for the second time. Once, he forgot the truth because of “the influence of the body,” and now, he forgot it because he was so preoccupied with his misfortune. Philosophy promises that he is ready to remember how the world really works. Boethius explains what he already knows: the world is “ruled by God,” who is the only “power capable of holding together” its diversity.
Boethius’s insistence that he is relearning Philosophy’s wisdom directly responds to her last song, in which she explained Plato’s belief that people “recall” knowledge that they have forgotten. Because his misery involved turning his focus to the worldly workings and effects of Fortune, this also counts, in a way, as forgetting because of “the influence of the body.” So far in Book III, Boethius has re-learned that God is the same thing as absolute happiness, unity, and goodness, and that all beings naturally desire all of these (synonymous) things.
Themes
Philosophy builds on Boethius’s point: they already know that self-sufficiency is part of happiness and “that God is happiness itself.” Therefore, God self-sufficiently “regulates all things.” Next, since “God is the good itself,” He regulates the world “by goodness.” He is like both a ship’s “helm” (its steering wheel) and its “rudder” (the piece of metal controlled by the steering wheel that actually directs the boat left or right). Philosophy reminds Boethius that “all things […] have a natural inclination towards the good,” and that all things therefore act “in harmony and accord” with God. Anything that tried to “go against God” would lose its battle because God is “supreme in power,” and so nothing can act contrary to Him. In conclusion, Philosophy declares, “it is the supreme good, then, which mightily and sweetly orders all things.” Boethius says he is “very happy” about Philosophy’s conclusion.
Philosophy builds out her picture of God by turning to a few of the numerous concepts she has already shown to be equivalent to God. In short, because God is self-sufficient, He cannot rely on anything else, so everything has to rely on Him. Since He is good, so is His influence on things, and since He is all-powerful, He controls everything. This is all she needs to reach her conclusion that God, or “the supreme good […] mightily and sweetly orders all things.” Although she puts the metaphor of “helm” and “rudder” first, in fact this is just a way of illustrating the ultimate conclusion: God is both the intelligent force that directs the world (the “helm”) and the medium by which the world is directed (the “rudder”). Of course, she and Boethius already took this conclusion for granted—all the way back in Book I. The only difference is that now they have proven it through logical argument, which Boethius considers necessary because this is a work of philosophy. But this extended proof of God’s nature also further supports Boethius’s insistence that philosophical reason can be a legitimate route to truths about the universe, and an all-powerful God can control that universe at the same time.
Themes
Philosophy decides to complicate things, so that God’s supreme power will guide their thinking. If God is omnipotent, she asks, “can God do evil?” Boethius says no, but Philosophy says that this means “evil is nothing.” Confused, Boethius summarizes Philosophy’s argument and notes that her whole chain of argument is based on “one internal proof grafted upon another.” Philosophy replies that, since God is self-contained and independent of external influences, her arguments have come from “within the bounds of the matter we have been discussing.”
Having proven whatever they can about the omnipotence, benevolence, natural desirability, and absolute unity of God, Philosophy turns to a glaring issue with the belief system that she has outlined, which has also been a central concern of Boethius’s since the beginning of the book: if God is so powerful and so good, why is there evil, and could He be responsible for making it? Philosophy actually ends up sticking by her answer that “evil is nothing,” but spends the entirety of Book IV offering a proof of this conclusion. In addition to pointing at his lifelong obsession with formal logic, Boethius’s reply about the structure of Philosophy’s argument affirms that he recognizes the necessity of proving God’s existence and nature through philosophy, rather than merely through faith.
Themes
In a lengthy song, Philosophy recounts the myth of Orpheus, a musician who begins to sing after his wife Eurydice dies. Although his powerful song attracts everything in the world, animate and inanimate, it does not soothe his grief. He goes to the underworld to try and save Eurydice and beguiles its residents with his song. Hades, “the monarch of the dead,” agrees to let Orpheus take Eurydice back, on the condition that he must not look at her until he leaves the underworld. But love is its own “law,” Philosophy sings, and cannot be caged: Orpheus looks upon Eurydice and so loses her forever. Philosophy concludes that this is a metaphor for how people must seek God: they should not turn around and look “back to darkness from the sky,” because that will lead them to lose all their progress.
Although she continues to proclaim that God is singular and all-powerful, now Philosophy recounts a classic tale from (polytheistic) Greek mythology. The tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice is a reminder of Boethius’s own impending execution, but it also encapsulates the problems of evil and human free will that occupy Boethius and Philosophy during the rest of the book: Orpheus errs and loses Eurydice by letting his emotion (his love for Eurydice) supersede his reason (his knowledge that he must not look at her). This error—a free act in defiance of divine orders—defines him forever, and yet it is merely the tragic product of an all-too-common human flaw. At the end of this song, Philosophy’s comparison between Orpheus and seeking God suggests that humans should also principally follow the evidence of their reason—namely, the arguments that Philosophy has just provided—and never again forget the secrets they have learned about the nature of God and the universe.
Themes
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