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Book IV, 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
Boethius interrupts Philosophy to ask whether she believes that chance exists. She suggests that this question might be distracting, but Boethius insists that he wants to know. Philosophy explains that, “if chance [means] random motion without any causal nexus,” it does not exist, because “God imposes order upon all things” and nothing happens without a cause. But chance can be explained through “Aristotle’s definition” of when an action produces “something other than what was intended.” She offers the example of someone digging in the dirt in order to cultivate the land and finding a trove of gold instead, which does have a set of causes: the fact that one person dug where another person had buried gold. Chance, Philosophy concludes, is “an unexpected event due to the conjunction of its causes with action which is done for some purpose” under God’s Providence.
Although Philosophy is right that Boethius’s question about chance has essentially no bearing on the course of the rest of the Consolation, there are still a few reasons why the author might have chosen to include it at the beginning of Book V. It might be simply an attempt to show off his knowledge of Aristotle or his gradually-improving ability to engage Philosophy in a genuine philosophical dialogue, rather than merely listening to her extended arguments. Additionally, Boethius may have thought that his readers would raise this doubt, as it certainly does have some tangential relevance to the rest of Book V. Namely, if things can be shown to happen somehow randomly, in a way that does not include God as a “causal nexus,” then humans can clearly have free will—but Philosophy’s argument about God’s nature is challenged. So by showing that chance is, in fact, created by God, but merely unanticipated by humans, Philosophy points to the limits of human intention and knowledge, which is an important part of her argument about the nature of human free will.
Themes
In her song, Philosophy envisions the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers reuniting downstream, and describes how “ships would meet […] and mingling streams would weave haphazard paths” there. But these outcomes, while products of apparent “random chance,” are also governed by various physical laws and causes.
In this song, Philosophy repeats her conclusion that chance is in the mind of beholder, and that if all things are viewed in terms of the eternal physical laws that they actually follow, then nothing will look accidental. Of course, contemporary science is founded on essentially the same belief.
Themes
