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Book II, Part I
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
Philosophy proposes that Boethius consider “Fortune’s own arguments.” Fortune would contend that she is not at fault for people’s ruin, since their possessions are not really theirs. This includes things like money, status, and power, and Fortune’s nature is to give them and then take them away—to “turn [her] wheel in its ever changing circle,” which “bring[s] the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top.” Speaking as Fortune, Philosophy offers some examples from history and suggests that, knowing the nature of Fortune, people can have hope for the future. But they must not insist on “living according to a law of [their] own in a world that is shared by everyone.”
Philosophy spends this whole section speaking in the voice of Fortune, who points out that the things under her control are—by definition—not under the control of the people who think they “possess” them. Therefore, like nearly every major religion and most of the major Greek philosophers, she insists that wisdom requires relinquishing one’s expectations for things that are not truly under one’s own control. When she distinguishes between people’s individual “law[s]” and the “world that is shared by everyone,” Fortune makes a similar argument in different terms: people must recognize the limits of their will and not try to interfere with other people’s autonomy or the workings of nature and the cosmos.
Themes
In song, Philosophy continues to speak for Fortune, who announces that people will always complain, no matter how successful they are. Their greedy desires cannot be satisfied—so people must control these desires themselves, for it is neither noble nor happy to live “convinced that [one always] needs more.”
Having shown why attachment to good fortune leads people to disappointment and ruin, Philosophy now looks at the other half of the equation and suggests that even those with good fortune are not truly happy, if they begin to measure themselves by their fortune rather than the things that are truly under their control. This is, of course, a classic trope from art and literature: the wealthy and powerful often grow greedier and crueler, not satisfied and wise, as they amass more wealth and power.
Themes
