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Book II, Part IV
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 next asks Boethius what is actually good about “the gifts that Fortune offers.” For instance, while some people think that money is inherently valuable, generosity wins people popularity—so giving away money is inherently valuable too. Hoarding wealth is evil, but one becomes poor by giving away all of one’s wealth, which is also undesirable. Similarly, “precious stones” are shiny but not as complex or beautiful as human beings themselves, and while “the countryside [is] beautiful,” it does not make the person who looks at it any better. Neither do Boethius’s beautiful clothes and numerous servants make him any better or more blessed of a person. People accumulate possessions to evade poverty, but actually waste their lives protecting their things and accumulating more. Philosophy concludes that people should “measure[] wealth according to the needs of nature, and not the excesses of ostentation.”
The apparent goodness of both having and giving away money shows, first, that there is nothing inherently good or bad about money in itself, except when it is in a particular social context and humans give it value. By extension, Fortune’s other “gifts” are equally meaningless—these things’ value comes from the people who use them and the ways they do so, and not from the things themselves. Secondly, this example shows that what popular opinion considers good and bad in different social contexts has very little to do with what is actually good and bad in an objective sense. Of course, contemporary readers can and should ask if there is a true difference between such socially-determined values and supposedly “objective” good and evil based on “the needs of nature.”
Themes
Philosophy tells Boethius that, although he has “a godlike quality in virtue of his rational nature,” he wrongly “thinks that his only splendor lies in the possession of inanimate goods.” He is a “superior” being but is obsessed with “adorn[ing his] superior nature with inferior objects.” And this makes him treat himself as though he were less than an animal. Material things are like decorations: even if they are beautiful, they do not change the nature of the underlying object they decorate. So wealth, Philosophy concludes, is not inherently good at all—it is just a decoration, and in fact it “often does harm to its owners,” for instance by making them targets for thieves and robbers.
Philosophy completes her argument about the worthlessness of “inanimate goods,” which is parallel to her belief in the ultimate irrelevance of people’s good or bad fortune. It is curious that she considers humans’ “rational nature” to be “godlike,” for she later argues that God’s powers of knowledge far exceed those of humans. What she appears to be saying is that humans’ rationality is what separates them from lower kinds of beings like animals and plants, and also lets them understand the cosmos, up to and including God, who is intelligible to humans only because of human reason. Therefore, she is beginning to explain why true happiness has something to do with knowledge and the contemplation of God.
Themes
In song, Philosophy praises “that long lost age” when people only consumed and used what they needed, rather than obsessively overeating, chasing beautiful things, and “plunder[ing] all the world” for personal gain. Now, they fight pointless wars and spill endless blood, motivated simply by “the passion to possess.”
Philosophy’s song refers to the notion of people living in alignment with nature in some mystical past before the rise of highly-organized human civilizations. This passage might seem quaint or even ironic to contemporary readers, for whom Boethius himself lives in a “long lost age” that only resembles our own in a few ways—one of which is, of course, the greedy, heartless “plunder” that continues around the world.
Themes
