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BoethiusConsolation Of Philosophy
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 524A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Human Emotion Dulls Reason
In Book 2, Boethius complains of the severe misfortune that has landed him in prison. Like Philosophy, Fortune is personified as a woman; in Book 2, Chapter 2, Philosophy interprets Fortune’s words and tells Boethius of the futility of placing his trust in her. Using logical deductions, Philosophy helps him to see that fortune is inherently capricious, and that nothing it brings is of any great value. She describes fortune as operating like a perpetual wheel, changing people's circumstances from happy to sad and vice versa.
One of the main ideas of the Consolation is that all fortune is inherently good since it functions to punish, correct, or encourage. Although we may immediately think of a stroke of ill fortune as bad, it will have a lasting moral effect. This is because fortune is under the control of God's providence, which is ordered to the good of all creatures. With this foundation, Philosophy expounds upon human emotion, positing that emotion has clouded Boethius’s mind. Emotion, Philosophy argues, distracts man from his true path to God.
God as the Pursuit of “True Happiness”
In Book 3, Boethius and Philosophy delve into the question of what constitutes true happiness. They establish that all beings desire happiness, that happiness is identical with the good, and that these in turn are identical with God. In the process, they reject such lesser goods as fame, money, power, and pleasure as being false paths to happiness.
In his meditations on happiness, Boethius follows in the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, established happiness as the ultimate good that all human beings seek and proceeded to distinguish happiness from pleasure and to identify the different forms of happiness. That lesser goods (such as beauty or pleasure) do not constitute the whole of happiness is proved by the fact that fortune can immediately take them away:
Your own nature doesn't make you look beautiful. It is due to the weak eyesight of the people who see you. Think how excessive this desire for the good of the body is, when, as you know, all that you admire can be reduced to nothing by three days of burning fever (62).
That which is beautiful and pleasurable on the surface can hide moral corruption within; Boethius cites Aristotle's mention of Alcibiades, the Greek military leader who was famous for his wealth and beauty but was morally “dissolute” (61).
Fate Versus Providence
In Book 4, Boethius and Philosophy discuss God's governance of the world, termed Providence. Boethius describes God as a “good helmsman” (104) who is both omniscient and omnipotent and who orders all events with wisdom and goodness. Providence is “the divine reason itself” (104) and is equivalent to the idea of “God's plan.” All things which are subject to change and motion have their cause in the unchanging, “Unmoved Mover” which is God. Simply stated, God, out of his goodness and wisdom, provides for all creatures and all circumstances.
Although fate might seem to be related to fortune, Boethius relates it to God's providence. Fate consists of the workings of Providence on our human, everyday existence. It is under the control of God, who orders it with a view to reward goodness and “correct” waywardness: “Everything, therefore, which comes under Fate, is also subject to Providence, to which Fate itself is subject” (105). Providence is eternal and unchanging; Fate is how Providence works itself out in time. Philosophy sums up the relationship between Fate and Providence:
The relationship between the ever-changing course of Fate and the stable simplicity of Providence is like that between reasoning and understanding, between that which is coming into being and that which is, between time and eternity (105).
The discussion of man's free will and God's foreknowledge occupies Book 5. Philosophy affirms the existence of free will as a necessary corollary of man's rational faculty, and the fact that it can co-exist with God's foreknowledge of future events. She seeks to reconcile God's ability to foresee actions with our freedom of the will.
Philosophy asserts that there is “no such thing as chance” and that God “imposes order upon all things” (116); yet at the same time, our actions are freely chosen, not predetermined. In this discussion, Boethius is following a thinker from a generation before who had investigated free will at length: St. Augustine, who in his On the Free Choice of the Will (De libero arbitrio) challenged determinism (the idea that our actions are predetermined) and asserted that evil is the result of man's abuse of his free will.
