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 surprise “at the magnitude of [Philosophy’s] promises,” and she begins her argument. She notes that, if good is shown to be strong, by implication evil is proven to be weak. So only one side of this equation needs to be proven. But Philosophy thinks she can prove both!
Readers are likely to share Boethius’s surprise: how can Philosophy possibly believe it—never mind prove it—to be just that tyrants have seized power in Rome and begun deposing, arresting, and executing dedicated civil servants like Boethius?
Themes
Philosophy states that human action requires two things: free will, which spurs people to take actions, and power, which gives them the capacity to follow through with actions. Importantly, one’s power can be measured by what one is capable of doing. She reminds Boethius that everyone desires (or instinctively wills) happiness, which is the same as “the good itself.” Good people successfully attain this goodness, and “the wicked” clearly fail to attain it. Since good people are capable of attaining the goodness they want, but wicked people are not, and power is defined by people’s capacity to attain what they want, then clearly the good are more powerful than the wicked.
Fortunately, this argument is rather more straightforward than Philosophy’s arguments about God at the end of Book III. Her analysis of human action as the combination of will and power allows her to equate evil with weakness: both the evil and the good have the same will, so if the good achieve their goal and the evil do not, then only their power must differ. Therefore, she encourages Boethius and the reader to see evil people as impotent fools: they want to be happy but are ignorant, weak, and confused, so they cannot fulfill their dreams. But readers might ask if this argument does justice to the devastation that evil causes: is it enough to tell the victim of a crime or other act of evil that the person who injured them was simply too ignorant to understand what they were really doing? And don’t evildoers, by definition, necessarily need physical power to carry out the evil they do?
Themes
Philosophy compares the difference between good and evil people to the difference between someone who walks “natural[ly]” on their feet and someone who cannot, and instead “tries to walk on [their] hands.” The person who walks on their feet is more powerful than the one who walks on their hands. Similarly, good people who pursue happiness through “a natural activity—the exercise of their virtues” are more powerful than evil people who seek happiness “by means of their various desires, which isn’t a natural method of obtaining the good.” In fact, the wicked are so weak that they fail even though “their natural inclination leads them” toward the good. But how is this possible?
The underlying assumption of Philosophy’s argument is the point she made at the end of Book III: everyone’s “natural” orientation is toward the good, and the natural way of pursuing the good is though reflection and prayer rather than indulgence in worldly pursuits. One might ask what makes these things more “natural” than their alternatives; Philosophy would likely respond that their naturalness somehow comes from God, who is himself absolutely good and makes all things follow him in being good. Yet, as she notices at the very end of this passage, this fact opens up another philosophical conundrum: how can things go against their own nature, if God is all-powerful? This is a version of the problem of free will that Philosophy and Boethius take up in Book V.
Themes
Philosophy considers various reasons for why people might go against nature and choose vice over virtue. Some suffer the profound weakness of ignorance and “do not know what is good.” Others know what is good but give into their instincts for “pleasure” because of a “lack of self-control.” And others, who “knowingly and willingly” choose evil over goodness, in fact “cease to exist.” Being wicked is like being dead: both lack “absolute and complete existence.” One cannot “simply call [a corpse] a [hu]man,” and neither can one call a wicked person fully human. These people have strayed so far from their natural inclinations that they can’t even be said to exist anymore.
Philosophy has left open the question of how people can freely disobey the nature put into them by God—she will address it later. Now, assuming that she will successfully prove it doable, she asks why people would do this. People who “knowingly and willingly” choose evil are less human than those who do evil out of ignorance or a “lack of self-control” because they understand that they are doing what is wrong and do so anyway. Philosophy is not saying that they literally disappear or cease to exist on the Earth—only that they lose their essential humanity, which revolves around their goodness. Still, Philosophy does not need to show that this category is truly independent of the others, for this would mean that it is possible to be evil without being ignorant or weak After all, if someone knows that they are doing something wrong, what could possibly make them do it anyway, besides a “lack of self-control” (as in the case of addiction, for instance) or excessive desires for material things (wealth, power, position, and the like), which go against nature and ultimately boil down to moral weakness?
Themes
Get the entire The Consolation of Philosophy LitChart as a printable PDF.
While some think that evil people can be powerful, Philosophy replies that their power “comes from weakness rather than strength,” and that if they were really strong, they would be able to do good. In fact, “evil is nothing,” so the wicked have only the power to “do nothing.”
This argument may seem quite paradoxical: how can power “come from weakness?” The answer is that Philosophy is not talking about literal physical weakness, but rather about the moral and mental weakness that she believes makes people choose evil over good. However, her conclusion might also seem paradoxical for an entirely different reason: there is no question that there are evil events, people, and things in the world. So in this sense, evil does exist. But then how can Philosophy argue that “evil is nothing?” What she really means is that evil is not a real, positively existing thing, like a physical object. Rather, it is a lack, weakness, or incapacity: evil is the gap between something’s current level of goodness and a perfect level of it. Just like a glass of water can “be” half-empty even though emptiness is not a “real” thing with positive existence, a person can be evil even though evilness does not technically exist, but is only a lack of goodness. So evil is “nothing” in the same way as an evil person lacks “absolute and complete existence.” Both lack the goodness that would make them complete, or in Philsophy’s terms, fully real.
Themes
So how can evil exist if God is supremely good, and nothing is more powerful than God? Indeed, God is good because He is supremely powerful and therefore “can only do good.” Humans, in contrast, are not supremely powerful, and so “can also do evil.” In closing, Philosophy summarizes that goodness is power, and evil is weakness. As Plato argued, the good achieve goodness and while the wicked pursue pleasure, but this gets in the way of them truly reaching “the good they desire.”
Since evil is simply a lack of goodness (and goodness is the same thing as God), things are evil simply because they fall short of the perfection that God embodies. People have no extra ingredient or component that makes them stray from God’s perfect goodness—rather, they stray simply because they are not as perfectly good as God. Therefore, even though God is only good, “can only do good,” and has only made people out of pure goodness, it is still possible for the people he creates to “be” evil. In fact, this argument is nearly identical to the view of good and evil presented by the Christian philosopher and Saint Augustine of Hippo, who predated Boethius by about a century and was also heavily influenced by Neoplatonic philosophers.
Themes
Philosophy sings of “savage” kings whose uncontrolled passions overtake them, distance them from happiness, and “enslave” them.
Philosophy returns to this example of how even people with great power, position, and intentions can fall into evil simply because their goodness or evilness (and, as a corollary, their happiness) depends fundamentally on their internal lives, not their external possessions and status.
Themes
