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Book I, Part V
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
In verse, Philosophy explains that one must cooperate with nature and follow the seasons to reap a bountiful harvest, for nothing can really interfere with God’s natural order.
Just as she argued at the end of the previous chapter that humans achieve “freedom” by “submitting to” God, here she again suggests that humans are only free when they fulfill the natural order that is set out for them. Clearly, the function of philosophy as a discipline (and Philosophy as a character) is to help remind people of what that natural role actually is.
Themes
Philosophy begins planning her “cur[e]” for Boethius by asking him a series of questions. First, she asks if he thinks that “life consists of haphazard and chance events, or […] is governed by some rational principle.” He replies that “God the Creator watches over” the world, which means that the world is rational. Philosophy points out that this contradicts his earlier monologue about humans existing separately from God’s rule and asks how God “guides” the world. Boethius says he does not know, and Philosophy affirms that his mind really has fallen ill.
Boethius’s lack of clarity about God’s role in the world is evidence of this ignorance, which is the illness that Philosophy plans to “cur[e]” by returning him to the truth. The contradiction between God’s guidance and humans’ errors and misdeeds actually raises one of the most classic, important problems in philosophy and theology: how can evil be possible if God is all good, and how can humans be free if God controls everything? Clearly, these doubts are not only Boethius’s—they are probably near-universal in 5th-century Rome, and remain crucial for anyone who hopes to reconcile philosophical reason with belief in a higher power.
Themes
Philosophy asks if Boethius remembers what nature’s end goal is, but he responds that he has forgotten. So Philosophy tells him to take a step back and think about his humanity. She asks him what defines a human being, and he replies that it is being a “rational and mortal animal.” But she declares that humans are “something more.” Indeed, Boethius’s illness comes from “hav[ing] forgotten [his] true nature.” He resents his oppressors because he does not truly remember how “the world is governed,” namely by “divine reason and not the haphazard of chance.” Philosophy promises to help him break through his ignorance, which she compares to a fog, and find “the resplendent light of truth.”
After talking about where the universe comes from, Philosophy continues helping Boethius get his bearings by turning to where it is headed. She concludes that the universe’s original and final causes, or its source and end goal, are both God Himself: he creates everything at the beginning and takes it back at the end. This means that humans are “something more” than mere “rational and mortal animal[s]” because of their inherent relationship to God and the rational universe as a whole. This portrayal of God resonates not only with the Christian tradition, but also with Plato’s belief in a “demiurge,” or original craftsman, which he outlines in the dialogue Timaeus. Notably, Philosophy also returns to the metaphor of truth as light, which again recalls Plato’s allegory of the cave.
Themes
