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Book III, 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
After a pause, Philosophy declares that everyone naturally wants the same thing: to be happy. Happiness “leaves nothing more to be desired,” because it is perfect “and contains in itself all that is good.” However, most people pursue mistaken versions of happiness, specifically by chasing “wealth, position, power, fame, [and] pleasure.” Philosophy agrees that all these things are good in their own ways. Wealth brings self-sufficiency. Good things win “respect and veneration,” and status or position. Power matters because superior things can’t be weak. Fame is important because excellent things almost always tend to become famous. And finally, pleasure is plainly desirable because everybody wants to feel positive emotions rather than negative ones.
Although Philosophy’s analysis about the nature of happiness might seem circular or perplexing, there is an easy way to test and prove her argument that everyone wants nothing more and nothing less than their own happiness. If people had everything they truly wanted, by definition they could not want anything more. And they would be as happy as possible, precisely because there is nothing they could add to their lives to make themselves any happier, or remove from their lives to make themselves less miserable. In practice, of course, Lady Philosophy sees a huge problem with this: people do not know what they really want. They think they want “wealth, position, power, fame, [and] pleasure,” but actually these things will not make them happy. Indeed, in Book II, she already explained why wealth, power, and fame have no role in happiness and are unimportant products of Fortune. But is it a contradiction that, now, she is emphasizing why they are important? Not at all: she is making a distinction between having a sufficient level of these five things, and constantly seeking more and more of them. For instance, everyone needs enough money to survive, but people lose their identities and become miserable through the constant pursuit of more and more money—similarly, everyone needs enough food to survive, but constantly overeating is likely to make people less happy than eating an adequate amount. So while happy people will have these five things, they will not necessarily pursue them—indeed, they would only do so when these things are severely lacking in their lives.
Themes
Philosophy again sings about the order of nature, noting how a lion who is tamed can still recover its natural instincts and rise up against its tamer, or a caged bird will inevitably remember its freedom and try to escape. She concludes that all things look for the ways of being that suit them best, constantly changing in an attempt at self-fulfillment. Indeed, things’ striving to supersede “the order [they] received” is part of the natural order, turning them into “a circle without end.”
In this song, Philosophy essentially returns to the principal that things stay the same by changing, but gets to this conclusion by a new path: now, she offers examples of things fulfilling their inner nature—just as it is humans’ inner nature to pursue happiness—and realizes that, in fact, it is the inner nature of the world as a whole to be constantly improving (or “supersed[ing]”) itself. It could even be said that she is presenting a theory of evolution here. The image of a “circle without end” is interesting and open to interpretation—it likely suggests that things are constantly going in circles, as they fulfill themselves and return to their starting points over and over for all eternity. Later, she argues that God is this starting and ending point.
Themes
