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Book III, Part XII
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 interrupts Philosophy to praise her wisdom and explain “the greatest cause of [his] sadness,” which is the existence and impunity of evil. In fact, evil people gain power and use it to punish the virtuous. How is this possible, Boethius asks, “in the realm of an omniscient and omnipotent God?”
Philosophy did formally introduce the problem of evil at the end of Book III, but now Boethius explains its personal significance to him: he is one of the good people who is being punished for his virtue (namely, his attempts to defend Rome’s Senate). The problem of how God and evil can both exist in the world is a classic problem in philosophy and theology, which many philosophers before Boethius—most notably Augustine—had already addressed at length.
Themes
Philosophy tells Boethius that he is misinterpreting the reality: God does not reward the evil above the good. In fact, the existence of God implies that the virtuous receive the rewards they are due and the evil their punishments. She promises Boethius that she will guide him to the comforting truth.
Here, Philosophy explicitly names the conclusion that she will aim to prove throughout the rest of Book IV: if God is truly totally benevolent and all-powerful, after all, then good people should receive good consequences and evil people should get evil ones. Essentially, she is promising Boethius that she will show that either the people he thinks are good are really evil (including himself) and vice versa, or, more likely, that in fact the consequences he sees as evil (including his punishment) are really good, and vice versa.
Themes
Philosophy sings about the power of her ideas, which she compares to “wings” that people can put on to ascend toward the heavens. People’s souls can pass by the stars and the planets, ascending to the outer reaches of God’s realm, which is actually a means of returning to their “source.”
Beyond offering the metaphor of people reaching God through rational reflection on the truth, here Philosophy also offers a specific, step-by-step depiction of the cosmos as it was understood to exist in Boethius’s time—it was viewed as a set of concentric circles, beginning with the Earth, the Moon, and the planets (including the Sun, which was thought to revolve around the Earth), and then proceeding to God himself, who presumably lay just beyond the bounds of our solar system.
Themes
