Previous
Book I, Part VII
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
Boethius now begins in prose. After a long pause, Philosophy tells him that his problem is his “longing for [his] former good fortune.” Fortune frequently “seduces” and then turns against people—but fortune has no value in itself. Nevertheless, bad fortune usually causes mental distress. Boethius needs soothing, Philosophy insists, so she calls for “sweet-tongued rhetoric” and music. In fact, because fortune always changes, “in the very act of changing” it has stayed the same for Boethius. And now, he has the benefit of understanding Fortune and being able to “turn away and have nothing more to do with her dangerous games.” Rather than letting Fortune control him, Boethius must plan for and accept its “wheel of chance.”
Having diagnosed Boethius’s suffering and promised to “cure” it in Book I, in Book II, Philosophy now begins her remedy by telling him not to trust in Fortune, whom the Romans considered a sadistic goddess. Again, because Boethius sees the Greek and Christian traditions as compatible, there is no contradiction between Fortune’s malevolence and the absolute benevolence of “God the Creator.” Here, Philosophy also further justifies her use of verse and song to help express and reemphasize the arguments she originally makes through logic. By truly understanding Fortune, she argues, people can learn to accept and prepare for her ahead of time, adjusting their expectations rather than being devastated when, as is inevitable, she crushes them.
Themes
From this point onwards, each part of each book ends in song. Here, Philosophy tells Boethius of Fortune “mov[ing] the turning wheel,” which overthrows empires and individual lives alike, with a complete indifference to people’s unhappiness. In fact, Fortune “laughs” at the havoc she wreaks, which is her way of “test[ing] her strength.”
The image of the Wheel of Fortune actually predates Boethius by at least a thousand years. It should be imagined as vertical, like a Ferris wheel that sends people upwards to prosperity and then drops them downwards to failure. Although the people riding the wheel are surprised at all their individual turns of fate, in fact the entire process is systematic and operates according to a fixed law of nature, which reflects the way Philosophy sees apparently cruel and meaningless events in people’s everyday lives as ultimately playing an important role in God’s overall plan for the universe.
Themes
