Previous
Book IV, Part II
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 asks what rewards good actions, and she realizes that the answer is goodness or happiness itself. The good already have their reward, and so they can maintain it forever, even when they are affected by “the wickedness of others,” unless they cease to be good. And because “those who attain happiness are divine,” being good allows people “to become gods,” whereas the wicked get punished by and through their own wickedness. Indeed, through their wickedness “they also [lose] their human nature” and become subhuman. She compares various wicked people to various kinds of animals, to whose level they have fallen through their wickedness.
Having established what good and evil are made of, now Philosophy wants to show that God fairly rewards good and evil alike. Of course, since the best thing to be rewarded with is goodness, her argument is self-consciously circular: since it is by definition good to do something good, when someone chooses to do something good, they reward themselves by doing that good thing. This is all she needs to show for her argument to work, but there could also be other levels to it: for example, taking good actions makes people better as people, acting with goodness is likely to make others respond to one in kind, etc. The supremely happy are like “gods” because, by definition, God is supreme happiness. And Philosophy seems to mean this literally: the souls of happy people become one with God when they die.
Themes
Philosophy sings about Odysseus getting lost on the island of the goddess Circe, who begins turning his crew into animals that threaten him. Odysseus’s crew has changed in every way except for their minds, which remain aware of their terrible situation. But this mind or soul is also the source of their strength, and so Philosophy notes that threats to “man’s true self” are more dangerous than afflictions that merely “harm the body.”
Again, in a way that might seem counterintuitive to contemporary readers but was perfectly consistent in Boethius’s time, Lady Philosophy uses polytheistic Greek myths to explain the way people should relate to the singular God. Here, she sees Odysseus’s encounter with Circe as evidence for the mind’s superiority over and independence from the body. In other words, people’s happiness and goodness are entirely under their own control precisely because they pertain exclusively to the mind.
Themes
