The Consolation of Philosophy for Seekers

Dear reader — the Consolation of Philosophy is a dialogue between a condemned man and a woman who appears in his cell, and she's Philosophy herself. It was written in Latin in the early 520s CE, in prison, by Boethius, a former Roman consul awaiting execution. In five short books she leads him out of despair by asking what happens to a person's idea of happiness when everything he thought he owned gets taken away. It was one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages. Which says something about how many people have been where he was.

How He Ended Up There

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was born around 477 CE into one of the oldest senatorial families of Rome. By then the western empire had fallen, and Italy was ruled by Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, who governed through the Roman Senate and administration. Boethius became consul in 510 and later master of the offices, and then around 523 he was accused of treason, probably for plotting with the eastern emperor, and imprisoned at Pavia. He was executed in 524 or 525. Theodoric was an Arian Christian, a Goth ruling a Roman population, and for most of his reign worked with the Senate and respected its traditions. In his last years he grew suspicious, and the arrest of Boethius is the most famous thing he did. He's hardly mentioned in the book, but he's the reason the narrator is in a cell. All Boethius says in his defense: "I brought to my duties no aim but zeal for the public good."

The Lady, The Songs, And The Muses She Throws Out

As Boethius sits mourning, a woman appears above his head. Great age and no age. Eyes burning "of a more than human keenness." Her height ordinary one moment and reaching the sky the next. Her robe, woven by her own hands, has a Greek pi at the hem and theta at the top, with steps between, and it's torn, a sign philosophy has been divided.

The book alternates between prose and verse, a form called prosimetrum. The prose carries the argument. The poems distill it into a picture or a prayer, sometimes from myth. Philosophy calls on Rhetoric and Music to make the cure go down easier.

First thing she does is get angry at the Muses of poetry who are dictating Boethius's laments. "Who has allowed yon play-acting wantons to approach this sick man — these who, so far from giving medicine to heal his malady, even feed it with sweet poison?" Poetry full of self-pity makes it worse. That's rare and maybe the most useful piece of advice in the book.

Book I: The Sorrows

Song II describes his mind as it was and is. It once ranged the heavens, tracked the sun, knew the causes of winds, tides, and seasons. Now: "Alas! in what abyss his mind / Is plunged, how wildly tossed!" He gives a bitter account of his fall and asks if she can see Fortune's cruelty in the very place, "the library, the room which thou hadst chosen as thy constant resort in my home."

Philosophy agrees his case is just. She grieves less for his fall than for the change in his mind, and tests him with questions. She finds three causes of the sickness: he's forgotten his own true nature, he doesn't know where the universe is heading, and he doesn't know how it's governed. His progress through the book isn't toward new knowledge. It's toward remembering.

Book II: Fortune

First remedy, and it's brutal. "Thou deemest Fortune to have changed towards thee; thou mistakest. Such ever were her ways, ever such her nature. Rather in her very mutability hath she preserved towards thee her true constancy." He didn't get betrayed by Fortune; he finally saw what she is.

The wheel: "What! art thou verily striving to stay the swing of the revolving wheel? Oh, stupidest of mortals, if it takes to standing still, it ceases to be the wheel of Fortune."

Then Philosophy gives Fortune her own voice. What wrong has she done? She took him in naked at birth, cherished him, and now draws back her hand. "Thou hast reason to thank me for the use of what was not thine own; thou hast no right to complain, as if thou hadst lost what was wholly thine." She isn't an enemy; she's a force that deals impartially, blind, changeable, and good-humored, with a clear view of her own rights. "I turn the wheel that spins. I delight to see the high come down and the low ascend."

Her examples: Croesus, king of Lydia, saved from his pyre only by a rain shower; Perseus of Macedon, a captive whose misfortune made even the Roman general Paullus weep. Homer's two jars at the threshold of Zeus, one of blessings and one of calamities. And a last twist from Fortune: "What if this very mutability of mine is a just ground for hoping better things?"

Book III: Happiness (The Center Of The Book)

Premise: all creatures, "though they take many paths, yet strive to reach one goal — the goal of happiness." The good is what leaves nothing further to be wanted. People just pick different roads. The desire for the true good is naturally implanted; "only error leads them aside." The mind wants to get home, but "like a drunken man, knows not by what path to return."

She goes through the false goods one by one. Riches create wants, so they never give sufficiency. Office and power depend on others and can be turned against the holder. Fame is other people's opinion. Pleasure brings its own pains, and the song on it has the line "She stings them that despoil her." She also grants what's right in each instinct: nothing completes happiness like "a state abounding in all good things, needing nothing from outside, but wholly self-sufficing." The question is where that can actually be found.

At the heart of the book she breaks into a prayer in verse, one of the most admired in the Consolation: the maker of earth and sky who rules the world by reason, at whose word time issues from eternity. It draws on Plato's Timaeus. And the line that sums it up: "the end and the beginning — One the guide, / The traveller, the pathway, and the goal."

Books IV And V: Evil, Fate, And Freedom

The question he's had from the start: if a good God runs the world, why do the wicked prosper and the good suffer? Philosophy answers with a string of paradoxes. Power waits upon the good, while the wicked are left destitute of strength, because to act you need will and power and both must be there. Then providence versus fate. "Providence is the Divine reason itself, seated in the Supreme Being, which disposes all things; fate is the disposition inherent in all things which move." What looks disordered from inside time looks ordered from outside it.

Book V takes on chance and free will. Her definition of eternity: "the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment." Not endless time. Anything living in time is a present moving from past to future and can't hold its whole life at once. Boethius asks the old problem: if God knows the future, can anything be free? Her answer: God doesn't foreknow, strictly. He knows everything in his eternal present. A man who watches another walk doesn't make him walk. The name for it is providence rather than prevision, because "its outlook embraces all things as from some lofty height."

She ends: the freedom of man's will "stands unshaken," and laws aren't unrighteous, since rewards and punishments are held out to wills "unbound by any necessity." Her last words to him are practical: "Therefore, withstand vice, practise virtue, lift up your souls to right hopes, offer humble prayers to Heaven."

Is It Even Christian

Weird fact: Boethius was a Christian, and wrote theological treatises on the Trinity and the person of Christ. But the Consolation, written at his worst hour, makes no explicit appeal to Christian doctrine, Scripture, or Christ. The consolation is wholly philosophical, though the prayer in Book III and the account of providence fit comfortably with a Christian reading. I don't have a tidy answer to why. People have argued for centuries.

King Alfred the Great translated it into Old English in the late ninth century, Chaucer into Middle English in the 1380s, and Queen Elizabeth I produced her own in 1593. Dante puts Boethius among the wise spirits in the Heaven of the Sun. Today people read it as a classic of philosophy, as a moving account of someone in extremity, or just as a book of comfort. It speaks to anyone who's lost a position, a loved one, or a sense of direction. Its answers may not persuade everyone.

To read it: the version quoted here is H. R. James's 1897 translation, free and readable but Victorian, with songs in rhymed verse. Modern ones are clearer. Check whether the songs are rendered in verse or prose. Five books, three or four sittings, and it's a good one to read slowly, one prose section at a time.