The Consolation of Philosophy

The Consolation of Philosophy is a dialogue written around 524 by Boethius, a Roman senator and philosopher, while he was imprisoned at Pavia awaiting execution on a charge of treason against the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. In five books of alternating prose and verse, the prisoner — Boethius himself — converses with Lady Philosophy, who appears to him in his cell and leads him from bitter complaint against his fate to an understanding of what happiness truly is and how a good God governs a world in which the innocent suffer. It became, after the Bible, perhaps the most widely read and translated book of the Middle Ages, and one of the great works of consolation in world literature.

At a glance

The dialogue

The book opens with the prisoner composing a mournful poem, attended by the Muses of poetry, who encourage his grief. A woman appears above his head: of immense age yet fresh in colour, of uncertain height — now of ordinary human stature, now seeming to touch the heavens with her head. Her robe, woven by her own hands of imperishable thread, is torn by violent men who carried off scraps of it; on its lower hem is embroidered the Greek letter Π (for practical philosophy), on its upper Θ (for theoretical), with steps between them like a ladder. In her right hand she carries books, in her left a sceptre. She drives away the Muses — “theatrical whores” who nourish the disease of grief with sweet poison — and, wiping his eyes, the prisoner recognises his old nurse, Philosophy.

He pours out his complaint: he served the state honestly, defended the innocent against corrupt officials, and now, for defending the Senate, is condemned without a hearing, stripped of his wealth and honours, exiled and awaiting death, while the wicked flourish. Why does God govern the stars in perfect order, yet allow human affairs to be ruled by blind chance? Philosophy diagnoses his illness: he has forgotten what he is, and what is the end of all things, and how the world is governed.

She begins with gentle remedies. He complains of Fortune; but Fortune’s nature is to change. She speaks in Fortune’s own voice: “I turn my wheel in its spinning circle; I delight to bring the lowest to the top and the highest to the bottom. Climb up, if you like, but on condition that you do not think it an injury when the rules of my game require your descent.” Fortune lent him wealth, a noble father-in-law, a virtuous wife, sons who were consuls together, a day of triumph; to complain when she takes back what was never his is ingratitude. And even now he retains his greatest treasures — Symmachus lives, his wife lives, his sons live. Wealth, power, office and fame are fragile and external; none can make a man good or happy, and all can be lost. Fame, measured against the vastness of the earth and the infinity of time, is nothing. Indeed, bad fortune is more useful than good: good fortune deceives, bad fortune teaches, showing who one’s true friends are.

Then Philosophy turns to stronger medicines. All human beings seek happiness, the perfect good that leaves nothing more to be desired. They seek it by different paths — wealth, honour, power, fame, pleasure — because each of these offers a part of the good: self-sufficiency, respect, power, celebrity, joy. But taken separately, these false goods fail: wealth brings anxiety and need of protection, office does not make one worthy, power is surrounded by fear, fame is often undeserved, pleasure ends in regret. True happiness must contain all these at once, and can be found only in what is perfectly good — and that is God. At the centre of the book stands the great hymn “O qui perpetua” (III, metre 9), a prayer modelled on Plato’s Timaeus to the creator who governs the world by eternal reason: “To see thee is our end, who art our beginning, our guide, our path, our goal.” Since God is the good itself, and happiness is the good, those who attain happiness become, by participation, gods. And since God governs all things by goodness, evil, strictly speaking, is nothing.

The prisoner presses his deepest objection: if God is good and all-powerful, why do the wicked prosper and the good suffer? Philosophy answers with paradoxes in the manner of Plato’s Gorgias. All people desire the good; the good attain it, the wicked fail. So the wicked are powerless: they cannot achieve what they really want. Evil men cease to be human, turning into beasts — the greedy into wolves, the violent into lions, the lazy into asses — as Circe turned Ulysses’ men into swine. The wicked are more wretched when they succeed in their crimes than when they fail, and more wretched unpunished than punished; punishment is a medicine, and they deserve pity rather than hatred.

She then distinguishes providence from fate. Providence is the divine reason itself, which embraces all things at once; fate is the ordered unfolding of that plan in time, through the motions of the stars, the powers of nature and the actions of spirits and men. Like the circles around a centre, the nearer a thing is to the divine mind, the freer it is from the chains of fate. What seems to us chance or injustice is part of an order we cannot see. All fortune is good — either rewarding, testing, correcting or punishing.

In Book V the prisoner raises the problem that has troubled philosophers ever since: if God foreknows all things, and cannot be mistaken, then everything he foreknows must happen necessarily — and then there is no free will, and rewards and punishments, hope and prayer, are pointless. Philosophy’s answer is that the problem arises from judging God’s knowledge by our own. Knowledge depends on the nature of the knower, not of the object: sense, imagination, reason and intelligence grasp the same thing differently. God’s nature is eternal, and “eternity is the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life” — not endless duration through time, but the possession of all time in a single present. God does not foresee the future; he sees all things, past, present and future, in his eternal present, as we see things happening now. Our seeing a man walk does not force him to walk; so God’s knowledge of our free acts does not make them necessary. There are two kinds of necessity: simple necessity (all men are mortal) and conditional necessity (if you know someone is walking, he must be walking); God’s knowledge imposes only the second, which leaves the act free. The book ends with an exhortation: “Avoid vices, cultivate virtues, lift up your mind to right hopes, offer humble prayers on high. A great necessity of goodness is laid upon you, since you act before the eyes of a judge who sees all things.”

There is no epilogue. The book breaks off at the end of Philosophy’s speech, and soon afterwards its author was put to death.

Themes

Consolation as therapy. The book follows the ancient genre of the consolatio, and the Stoic and Platonic idea of philosophy as medicine for the soul: gentle remedies first, then stronger ones. What can be taken away by Fortune was never truly ours; what is truly ours — virtue, reason — cannot be taken.

A Christian book without Christ. Though Boethius was a Christian and wrote theological treatises, the Consolation makes no reference to Christ, Scripture or the sacraments. Scholars have long debated why — whether it is a deliberate exercise in what reason alone can achieve, or a sign that in extremity he found comfort in pagan philosophy. Medieval readers saw no conflict.

Form. The alternation of prose and poetry, from elegiac laments to philosophical hymns, enacts the soul’s movement: the poems summarise, lament, celebrate and lift the argument into song.

In conversation

• Fortune’s wheel — “I delight to bring the lowest to the top.”
• “O qui perpetua” — the hymn at the heart of the book.
• The eternal present — foreknowledge without necessity.