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 raises another doubt: isn’t there a contradiction between “God’s universal foreknowledge and freedom of the will?” That is, if Providence has determined the future, how can people truly control their actions? Philosophy notes that some argue that “the necessity of events […] cause[s] the foreknowledge” of them. But, she continues, it would be “absurd” to think that humans’ limited actions in the physical world cause or determine God’s eternal plan. If “God foreknow[s] that these things will happen,” He must be right, which creates a serious “disruption of human affairs.” If people do not choose their good and wicked actions, then rewards and punishments are meaningless, or even unjust. And this would mean that God is even responsible for human evil, and “hope and prayer” lose their meaning and power. How could people be deeply connected to God under such circumstances?
Boethius now explicitly poses the central question of Book V, which is a classic philosophical problem of the same magnitude as the problem of evil from Book IV: how can people have free will in a world that, from top to bottom, is designed and known in advance by God? The second of these traits—which Philosophy calls “God’s universal foreknowledge”—is actually the focus of this discussion. (Presumably, since God has all forms of power including freedom, there is no contradiction in him giving His creations some measure of it.) In common language, the dilemma is this: how can God know with absolute certainty what everyone will do, before they decide to do it? When she cites the “disruption of human affairs,” Philosophy reminds the reader—this time in more depth—why it is so important for her theory of the universe that humans truly be free.
Themes
Philosophy asks how there can be “such enmity” between God’s Providence and the human will. How can the mind, she sings, yearn “to learn the secret signs of truth” unless it already knows them? And how could people learn anything if they “search / in ignorance?” The mind once knew the truth of God, she sings, seeing “sum and separate truths” at once, and in life it continues to retain that memory: “the many separate truths are lost, yet still / [the mind] holds the sum.” In other words, knowledge-seekers are neither knowledgeable nor “wholly ignorant” of the truth, but rather add new information to the elements of the truth they always already know.
Philosophy’s song about knowledge references the structure of her dialogue with Boethius: he has forgotten the truths of her wisdom due to his misery and preoccupation with material things, but he still “holds the sum” of truth somewhere deep in his mind, and learns to recover it over the course of their conversation. In fact, her argument—that people somehow have “the sum” of truth inscribed somewhere in their souls, but forget it through the bodies until they are able to relearn it through philosophy—comes straight from Plato’s theory of knowledge in the dialogue Meno, and is essentially a statement of philosophy's purpose for its disciples.
Themes
