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
Philosophy tells Boethius that his doubt is “an old complaint about Providence,” but accuses his argument of lacking “care and rigour” and admits that “human reasoning” will never fully grasp Providence because it cannot “approach the immediacy of divine foreknowledge.” She starts by considering the stance that God’s foreknowledge might not constrain human free will, or even determine events in advance. This foreknowledge would count as “a sign” of what will happen, but does not cause these things to happen.
Philosophy claims to only be considering one line of argument, but in fact this ends up being the argument she makes to refute Boethius’s “complaint about Providence.” In short, she believes that God can know what people will eventually decide to do because he is capable of knowing in ways that transcend time because they are “immedia[te]”—they see the future as though it were the present. So God can have “sign[s]” of what people will do that people themselves do not even recognize, because He made people and knows precisely how they work.
Themes
But could God have foreknowledge of things that do not happen out of necessity—things that aren’t inevitable? This would resolve the apparent contradiction between God’s foreknowledge and human free will. But Philosophy notes that many people would take issue with this solution because, “unless it is certain,” foreknowledge is not truly knowledge, but rather “only clouded opinion.” And yet Philosophy concludes that these people are wrong, for they think that their knowledge depends on the nature of the things they know. But in reality, knowledge depends on “the ability to know of those who do the knowing.”
Again, Philosophy emphasizes how rational knowledge ordinarily works for people—no human being can know anything “unless it is certain.” (Although she claims that those who hold this view are wrong in general, Philosophy does consider this true of humans.) By redirecting the reader toward “the ability to know of those who do the knowing,” Philosophy shows why God’s superior capacity for knowledge matters so much: while humans are limited to knowing only things that are certain and having “clouded opinion” about things that are not, God supersedes this limitation. In other words, He can know things that are not certain.
Themes
Philosophy gives an example to explain why knowledge depends on the knowing subject’s methods, and not the objects that are known. For instance, one can determine that a shape is round by seeing it or by touching it. Similarly, one can understand human beings through four different methods: “sense-perception, imagination, reason and intelligence.” Sense-perception looks at humans’ “shape as constituted in matter,” imagination at their “shape alone without matter,” reason at the truths “individual instances” reveal about humanity as a whole, and intelligence at “the simple form” of humanity through “the pure vision of the mind.”
Although it may seem dense and confusing because she is talking about how it is possible to know about human beings, Philosophy’s four-part taxonomy of knowledge is actually fairly straightforward. It is possible to know things through the senses (sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste), which tell people about one particular object. People can imagine the “shape alone” of things, “without [having] matter” physically present in front of them, and they can also logically reason about things, which tells them about those things’ general or universal traits. “Intelligence” is the only unfamiliar aspect of knowledge, because this is what makes God superior to humans. It lets him somehow understand humankind in a “pure” way. Fortunately, Philosophy soon explains what this entails in more depth.
Themes
Philosophy continues by arguing that each progressively “superior” way of knowing “includes [all] the inferior [ones].” Intelligence is the highest of all. So through intelligence, one can understand “universals,” “shape,” and “matter”—the domains of reason, imagination, and sense-perception, respectively—all through “the single glance of the mind.” Similarly, reason includes the insights of imagination and sense-perception: for instance, rationally one can know that “man is a biped rational animal,” which “is a concept which can be both imagined and perceived by the senses.” And through the imagination one can “survey all sensible objects” and imagine how they would feel, smell, sound, etc.
Although her argument about intelligence might remain opaque, it should be remembered that intelligence is by definition outside of humans’ capacity for comprehension, and that Philosophy will eventually explain it better. Still, readers can understand the principle that each particular form of knowledge “includes [all] the inferior [ones]” by taking a straightforward example. People can know certain things about apples, as a universal category (they are kind of round, they are red or green, they have stems and thin skin, etc.). Using this rational knowledge, it is possible to imagine an apple, and by using this imaginary mental picture of an apple, it is possible to learn what an apple would look and feel like. So rational knowledge of an apple gives people the capacity to know about apples through the imagination and senses, too. Following this principle, God’s intelligence will include all three of the lower forms of knowledge, which Philosophy will eventually show is the reason that He can know what humans do before they do it.
Themes
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Although her argument remains incomplete, Philosophy interrupts it with a song praising the Stoic school of philosophers, who believed that sense-perception involved an object making an impression on the human mind much like a seal makes an impression on a piece of wax, or a stamp on paper. But the body is not just “passive to receive” these “imprint[s]”—it can also analyze and combine the things learned through the senses in order to “progress” and form true beliefs. This requires “the power of the mind,” which in turn “calls forth the species from within” and makes sense of the received sense-impressions by combining them with “forms it hides within.”
Philosophy nods to another important group of her disciples, whose works Boethius also studied throughout his life, and adds more context to the taxonomy of kinds of knowledge that she has just laid out. Because the Stoics analyzed sense-perception as a purely “passive” form of knowledge, this means that it does not require free will or enable active decision-making, which humans have specifically because they are rational, able to separate out and weigh propositions, ideas, and principles—in other words, universal “forms”—and then decide what to do on the basis of them.
Themes
