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Book III, 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
Summarizing Book III so far, Philosophy declares that she has debunked the five most common “roads to happiness,” which all lead people to danger, evil, and folly. When humans strive for “puny and fragile” goals like power and pleasure, they miss the profound beauty of the heavens. Meanwhile, the physical beauty of the human body is superficial and can always be erased quickly by simple illness.
Returning to her central point about the five “roads to happiness”—they may be good for some limited purposes, but are not inherently good in and of themselves—Philosophy again makes it clear that these “puny and fragile” interests contrast with the mind’s more far-reaching, universal ones. Clearly, because she and Boethius believe the mind (or soul) to be eternal and the body to be only a temporary vessel, true happiness must involve pursuits of the mind.
Themes
Philosophy sings of the “wretched ignorance” that makes people seek riches and power, while forgetting where to really find “the good they seek.” When their worldly pursuits fail, they can finally learn to “see the tru[th]” and pursue real happiness.
It is worth noting that Philosophy does not blame malice or bad intentions for evil: the culprit is ignorance, a lack of knowledge rather than a form of conscious wrongdoing.
Themes
