Boethius’s title is deceptively literal: he dialogues with Philosophy in this book not because he seeks wisdom about the universe, but because he is sad and wants consolation. Having suffered a cascade of misfortune, Boethius is ultimately accused of plotting to overthrow Ostrogothic King Theodoric and awaits an unjust execution ordered by the very ruler Boethius spent decades serving. He craves some deeper understanding of his situation and wants to determine if he can still live his final days with a sense of genuine purpose and peace. And Philosophy successfully gives Boethius the consolation he seeks: she shows him that his downfall does not affect his true happiness, since “God is the essence of happiness” and one’s fortune in life has nothing to do with it. Rather, wise people recognize the futility of searching for happiness in earthly pleasures rather than in “the sum of happiness” that is attainable through God.
At first, Boethius is miserable and confused because he wrongly ties his sense of self and happiness to his fortune in the world. He has fallen from a remarkable position as one of the king’s closest personal advisors to an unenviable place in jail, awaiting execution for a crime he did not commit. The poem Boethius recites at the very beginning of the Consolation demonstrates his misery, and he blames Fortune for destroying the perfect happiness he used to possess. Luckily, Lady Philosophy shows up to serve as Boethius’s “nurse” and emphasizes that Fortune is not the same as happiness. She personifies Fortune as a trickster goddess who cruelly “seduces” people and then gleefully crushes them, sending them up and down as though on a wheel. Because fortune is always unstable, anyone who bases their happiness on it—like Boethius—is bound to be disappointed. But Philosophy declares that, despite Boethius’s imprisonment and impending senseless death, he “still possess[es] outstanding blessings.” While good fortune, “wealth, honours and the like” are not true possessions, since they can be given or taken away, Boethius possesses the “precious” things that are really his own: loyal family and friends, sharp and infallible reason, and knowledge of God. According to Philosophy, wise people focus on these possessions, the stable elements that really compose happiness, rather than “hop[ing for] and fear[ing]” the Wheel of Fortune.
Philosophy explains that people usually seek five things in their quest for happiness through Fortune: “wealth, position, power, fame, [and] pleasure.” This is Boethius’s error, since pursuing each of these things actually leads people to misery, rather than happiness. Philosophy affirms that these five things are important, but only to an extent: someone who is truly happy will have a balance of all five. Wealth is only important because it leads to self-sufficiency, position because it gives people their due respect, power because it ensures people are not “weak and impotent” to fulfill their desires, fame because it is a sign “of great excellence,” and pleasure because people always want “delight” rather than “suffering.” However, pursuing these goals independently of one another is dangerous. For example, the pursuit of wealth is pointless because people are “superior” to the inanimate things they hope to possess, which have no value in themselves. In fact, the rich tend to become cruel, evil, selfless, unempathetic, and gluttonous, so pursuing wealth leads to misery, not happiness. Philosophy makes similar points about position, power, fame, and pleasure: the pursuit of each is self-undermining, and can even lead people to sacrifice the others (like when, in the pursuit of pleasure, someone spends all their money and loses others’ respect). Real happiness, Philosophy explains, is not about these five “puny and fragile” pursuits, which are subject to the whims of Fortune. While a happy person has all of them, happiness “has no parts,” so “seeking the sum of happiness” is the only legitimate strategy.
In order to find “the sum of happiness,” humans must turn away from the material world and focus on developing a relationship to God. First, Philosophy explains that “the sum of happiness” must be at once absolutely self-sufficient, absolutely powerful, absolutely “worthy of veneration,” “unsurpassed in fame and glory,” and finally, “supremely happy.” The five dimensions of happiness—“wealth, position, power, fame, [and] pleasure”—are “differ[ent] in name, but not in substance.” Since nothing is greater than God, Philosophy’s argument continues, nothing can be more powerful, “worthy of veneration,” or “supremely happy” than God himself. Therefore, “God is the essence of happiness,” and happiness’s five dimensions are actually just material “shadows of the true good.” But this raises a question that scholars of Boethius have debated for centuries: to achieve true happiness, what relationship should people have to God? First, Philosophy explains that people can become happy “through the possession of divinity,” which is about taking “refuge from distress” in prayer. Taking this idea further, the last two books of the Consolation focus on what can be known about the nature of God, which suggests that knowledge of God is an important part of achieving absolute good. Finally, Philosophy and Boethius agree that the human soul is immortal and returns to God after death, which implies that one should achieve happiness in the process. Therefore, Philosophy’s teachings lead Boethius away from his false happiness (based on Fortune) and toward true happiness (based in God) on a handful of levels: she reminds him to pray and think of God; she teaches him about God’s true nature, the knowledge of which is a form of divinity and happiness; and she reminds Boethius that, when he does die, he will return to God and get the opportunity to be truly happy, despite the profound injustice that has tainted his final days on Earth. Boethius’s misfortune, Philosophy suggests, is actually good for him: it is the world’s way of reminding him about God, the only truly absolute good that exists. But even if Boethius did not accept Philosophy’s arguments about God, her lessons about fortune still remind Boethius about the futility of his worldly pursuits, and therefore console him in his darkest hour.
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Wisdom, Fortune, and Happiness Quotes in The Consolation of Philosophy
While with success false Fortune favoured me
One hour of sadness could not have thrown me down,
But now her trustless countenance has clouded,
Small welcome to the days that lengthen life.
Foolish the friends who called me happy then:
For falling shows a man stood insecure.
Now I know the other cause, or rather the major cause of your illness: you have forgotten your true nature. And so I have found out in full the reason for your sickness and the way to approach the task of restoring you to health.
Inconstancy is my very essence; it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever changing circle, filled with joy as I bring the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top.
You should not wear yourself out by setting your heart on living according to a law of your own in a world that is shared by everyone.
I can’t put up with your dilly-dallying and the dramatization of your care-worn grief-stricken complaints that something is lacking from your happiness. No man is so completely happy that something somewhere does not clash with his condition. It is the nature of human affairs to be fraught with anxiety; they never prosper perfectly and they never remain constant.
From all this it is obvious that not one of those things which you count among your blessings is in fact any blessing of your own at all. And if, then, they don’t contain a spark of beauty worth seeking, why weep over their loss or rejoice at their preservation? If Nature gives them their beauty, how does it involve you? They would still have been pleasing by themselves, even if separated from your possessions. It isn’t because they are part of your wealth that they are precious, but because you thought them precious that you wanted to add them to the sum of your riches.
You creatures of earth, don’t you stop to consider the people over whom you think you exercise authority? You would laugh if you saw a community of mice and one mouse arrogating to himself power and jurisdiction over the others. Again, think of the human body: could you discover anything more feeble than man, when often even a tiny fly can kill him either by its bite or by creeping into some inward part of him? The only way one man can exercise power over another is over his body and what is inferior to it, his possessions. You cannot impose anything on a free mind, and you cannot move from its state of inner tranquillity a mind at peace with itself and firmly founded on reason.
In all the care with which they toil at countless enterprises, mortal men travel by different paths, though all are striving to reach one and the same goal, namely, happiness, beatitude, which is a good which once obtained leaves nothing more to be desired. It is the perfection of all good things and contains in itself all that is good; and if anything were missing from it, it couldn’t be perfect, because something would remain outside it, which could still be wished for. It is clear, therefore, that happiness is a state made perfect by the presence of everything that is good, a state, which, as we said, all mortal men are striving to reach though by different paths. For the desire for true good is planted by nature in the minds of men, only error leads them astray towards false good.
The sun into the western waves descends,
Where underground a hidden way he wends;
Then to his rising in the east he comes:
All things seek the place that best becomes.
Each thing rejoices when this is retrieved:
For nothing keeps the order it received
Except its rising to its fall it bend
And make itself a circle without end.
What sort of power is it, then, that strikes fear into those who possess it, confers no safety on you if you want it, and which cannot be avoided when you want to renounce it?
Human perversity, then, makes divisions of that which by nature is one and simple, and in attempting to obtain part of something which has no parts, succeeds in getting neither the part—which is nothing—nor the whole, which they are not interested in.
O Thou who dost by everlasting reason rule,
Creator of the planets and the sky, who time
From timelessness dost bring, unchanging Mover,
No cause drove Thee to mould unstable matter, but
The form benign of highest good within Thee set.
All things Thou bringest forth from Thy high archetype:
Thou, height of beauty, in Thy mind the beauteous world
Dost bear, and in that ideal likeness shaping it,
Dost order perfect parts a perfect whole to frame.
[…]
Grant, Father, that our minds Thy august seat may scan,
Grant us the sight of true good’s source, and grant us light
That we may fix on Thee our mind’s unblinded eye.
Disperse the clouds of earthly matter’s cloying weight;
Shine out in all Thy glory; for Thou art rest and peace
To those who worship Thee; to see Thee is our end,
Who art our source and maker, lord and path and goal.
It is the universal understanding of the human mind that God, the author of all things, is good. Since nothing can be conceived better than God, everyone agrees that that which has no superior is good. Reason shows that God is so good that we are convinced that His goodness is perfect. Otherwise He couldn’t be the author of creation. There would have to be something else possessing perfect goodness over and above God, which would seem to be superior to Him and of greater antiquity. For all perfect things are obviously superior to those that are imperfect. Therefore, to avoid an unending argument, it must be admitted that the supreme God is to the highest degree filled with supreme and perfect goodness. But we have agreed that perfect good is true happiness; so that it follows that true happiness is to be found in the supreme God.
Then I said, “I agree very strongly with Plato. This is the second time you have reminded me of these matters. The first time was because I had lost the memory through the influence of the body, and this second time because I lost it when I became overwhelmed by the weight of my grief.”
Men who give up the common goal of all things that exist, thereby cease to exist themselves. Some may perhaps think it strange that we say that wicked men, who form the majority of men, do not exist; but that is how it is. I am not trying to deny the wickedness of the wicked; what I do deny is that their existence is absolute and complete existence. Just as you might call a corpse a dead man, but couldn’t simply call it a man, so I would agree that the wicked are wicked, but could not agree that they have unqualified existence. A thing exists when it keeps its proper place and preserves its own nature. Anything which departs from this ceases to exist, because its existence depends on the preservation of its nature.
This is why among wise men there is no place at all left for hatred. For no one except the greatest of fools would hate good men. And there is no reason at all for hating the bad. For just as weakness is a disease of the body, so wickedness is a disease of the mind.
“All fortune is certainly good.”
“How can that be?”
“Listen. All fortune whether pleasant or adverse is meant either to reward or discipline the good or to punish or correct the bad. We agree, therefore, on the justice or usefulness of fortune, and so all fortune is good.”
God has foreknowledge and rests a spectator from on high of all things; and as the ever present eternity of His vision dispenses reward to the good and punishment to the bad, it adapts itself to the future quality of our actions. Hope is not placed in God in vain and prayers are not made in vain, for if they are the right kind they cannot but be efficacious. Avoid vice, therefore, and cultivate virtue; lift up your mind to the right kind of hope, and put forth humble prayers on high. A great necessity is laid upon you, if you will be honest with yourself, a great necessity to be good, since you live in the sight of a judge who sees all things.
