The Consolation of Philosophy

Overview

About a hundred and fifty pages, written in five books alternating prose and verse, composed by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius around 524 CE while imprisoned at Pavia, awaiting execution on a charge of treason he maintained, and modern historians generally believe, was false or at least grossly exaggerated. Boethius had been one of the most powerful men in Rome, a consul, the father of two sons who both became consuls in the same year, and a scholar who had set himself the immense project of translating all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin and reconciling them, a project cut catastrophically short by his fall from favor with the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, who then ruled Italy, and his subsequent execution.

The book became, over the following thousand years, one of the most widely read and most influential works in the entire history of Western literature, translated into Old English under the direction of King Alfred, into Middle English by Chaucer, and into Elizabethan English by Queen Elizabeth I herself, reportedly in a matter of days. Its influence on medieval literature, philosophy and theology is difficult to overstate, and it is a genuinely striking fact, much discussed by scholars, that a work written by a man later venerated in parts of the Christian tradition as a martyr contains no explicit reference to Christ, to specifically Christian doctrine, or to the sacraments at all, proceeding instead entirely through the resources of Platonic and Stoic philosophy.

The argument

The prisoner’s despair, and the appearance of Lady Philosophy. The book opens with Boethius in his cell, composing mournful elegiac verses about his ruined fortune, when a majestic woman of indeterminate but clearly immense age appears to him, identifying herself as Philosophy. She drives away the Muses of poetry who had been keeping him company, calling them, memorably, theatrical tarts who feed his grief with sweet poison rather than curing it, and begins instead a sustained conversation, alternating her own prose argument with poems, meant to lead him back from self-pitying despair to genuine understanding.

Fortune’s wheel, Book II. Philosophy’s first major argument addresses Boethius’s complaint that Fortune has treated him unjustly, stripping him of position, wealth and safety after years of apparent favor. Her answer is that this complaint fundamentally misunderstands what Fortune is: inconstancy is Fortune’s very nature, the game she has always played, turning her wheel to raise some and lower others without any promise or obligation to leave anyone permanently at the top. Everything Fortune gave, position, wealth, reputation, was never truly Boethius’s own possession in the first place but only ever on loan, subject to being reclaimed, and complaining that she has reclaimed it is like complaining that a game has been played according to its own established rules. Philosophy adds a harder, more paradoxical claim: real security comes only once Fortune has been abandoned entirely, since only then does a person stop depending on something inherently unstable for their sense of well-being.

False goods, Book III. Philosophy turns to examine, one by one, the things people commonly pursue as sources of happiness, wealth, high office, political power, fame and bodily pleasure, and argues that each is either insufficient on its own terms, wealth creates anxious dependents to feed and thieves to guard against rather than genuine contentment, or actively self-undermining, power acquired through fear makes the powerful person more afraid rather than less, since fear cuts both ways. None of these goods, examined honestly, delivers the complete, self-sufficient satisfaction genuine happiness would require. True happiness, Philosophy concludes, cannot be any partial or unstable good at all; it must be identical with the highest good itself, perfect, complete and sufficient in itself, which she identifies, in an argument drawing heavily on Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition, with God.

The weakness of the wicked, Book IV. Boethius raises the objection that troubles every theodicy: if God is good and providence governs the world, why do the wicked so often flourish while the good suffer? Philosophy’s answer proceeds by inverting the ordinary evaluation of power and success. Genuine power, she argues, is the capacity to achieve what one truly wills, and since everyone truly wills the good, whether or not they recognize it as such, the wicked, who consistently fail to achieve genuine good even while accumulating wealth or dominance, are actually weaker and less capable than they appear, not stronger. Wrongdoing corrupts and weakens the wrongdoer’s own nature, so that the wicked person, however outwardly successful, is worse off than a virtuous person who suffers, and unpunished wickedness is, on this account, actually worse for the wicked person than punished wickedness, since punishment at least offers the possibility of correction.

Providence, fate and freedom, Book V. The final and philosophically most demanding book takes up the hardest problem the dialogue has been building toward: if God’s providence knows in advance everything that will happen, including every human choice, how can human choice be genuinely free rather than simply predetermined? Philosophy’s resolution turns on a careful distinction between the nature of God’s knowledge and the nature of ordinary human foreknowledge. Human beings, existing within time, experience past, present and future as genuinely successive; when we predict an event, that prediction, if it constrains anything, constrains a future state of affairs. God, by contrast, exists entirely outside time, in what Boethius calls an eternal, ever-present now, in which all of time, past, present and future alike, is present simultaneously and immediately, the way an observer positioned above a road can see an entire journey at once rather than watching a traveler pass one point at a time.

On this account, God does not, strictly speaking, foresee human choices in the way a human predictor would, anticipating a future event before it occurs; God simply knows, in a single eternal act outside time altogether, what a free agent does, is doing and will do, all at once, in exactly the way a person watching someone walk past a window knows what that person is doing without thereby causing or compelling the walking. Divine knowledge, on this account, no more removes the freedom of the act known than a human being’s observing another person’s free choice as it happens removes that person’s freedom in making it.

How to read it

Read the whole book as a single, developing conversation rather than five separate treatises, since Philosophy’s argument builds cumulatively, from the initial correction about Fortune, through the examination of false goods, to the harder problems of evil’s apparent success and, finally, providence and freedom.

Read the verse sections, the metra interspersed between the prose arguments, as genuinely part of the argument rather than as decorative interludes; Boethius uses them to summarize, to illustrate through myth and image, Orpheus and Eurydice appears memorably in Book III, and to modulate the emotional register of the dialogue as it proceeds.

Notice, and sit with, the book’s striking absence of explicit Christian content. Written by a man facing execution, who was himself a Christian and would be venerated by some later medieval tradition as a martyr, the Consolation works entirely through Platonic and Stoic philosophical resources rather than through scripture, prayer or explicit Christian doctrine, and deciding what to make of that choice, made by a man in his final months of life, is one of the most genuinely interesting interpretive questions the book raises.

Work through the eternity argument in Book V slowly and with real patience; it is the most technically demanding section of the book and also its most historically influential, becoming, through later transmission particularly via Aquinas, the standard medieval solution to the problem of reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom.

Read this book knowing what happened to its author shortly after writing it: Boethius was executed, by most historical accounts brutally, not long after completing this work, and reading his own philosophical consolation with that knowledge in view gives the text a weight that reading it as pure abstract argument would miss.

Questions it raises

• Does Philosophy’s argument about Fortune’s essential inconstancy actually console, or does it simply redescribe the loss Boethius suffered in terms that make complaint seem unreasonable without actually addressing the injustice of his particular situation?
• Is the claim that the wicked are secretly weaker and unhappier than the virtuous, however successful they appear, a genuine philosophical insight or a comforting fiction offered to someone facing execution at the hands of exactly such a wicked and successful person?
• Does the distinction between God’s eternal, atemporal knowledge and human temporal foreknowledge actually solve the problem of free will and providence, or does it merely relocate the difficulty into a claim about divine timelessness that is itself hard to make fully coherent?
• What is the significance of a Christian author, in his final months of life, writing an extended philosophical consolation with no explicit reference to Christian doctrine at all? What does that choice suggest about the relationship between philosophy and faith as Boethius understood it?
• Is Philosophy’s argument that true happiness must be identical with the highest good, and therefore with God, a valid inference, or does it simply assume, rather than establish, the conclusion Boethius needs to reach?
• Given how directly Boethius’s own life ended shortly after writing this consolation, does knowing his fate change how persuasive or how moving the book’s arguments feel, and should a reader’s assessment of a philosophical argument depend at all on what subsequently happened to the person who made it?