PATIENT
The Consolation of Philosophy
COMPOSED
c. 524 CE
FORM
Alternating prose and verse
SETTING
A prison cell, awaiting execution
CHIEF COMPLAINT
What have I really lost, what is happiness, and is the world as disordered as it looks?
HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS
Boethius (c. 477–524 CE), a former consul under the Gothic king Theodoric, sits in prison waiting to be executed, and a woman who is Philosophy appears at his bedside. She does not offer easy comfort. She asks him what he has really lost, what happiness really is, and whether the world is as disordered as it looks. Written in the last months of the author's life, it became one of the most read books of the Middle Ages.
REVIEW OF SYSTEMS
FORTUNE
What gives and takes what is not ours. The aim is not to defeat her but to stop mistaking her gifts for the self.
THE HIGHEST GOOD
A single, complete, self-sufficient good that contains all the others. It is happiness, and Boethius says it is God.
PROVIDENCE
The whole order of the world as it exists in the mind of God, which we see only in pieces, as fate, in time.
ETERNITY
The possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment. The key to how God can know and we can still choose.
FREE WILL
Foreknowledge does not make events necessary, so free will stays unshaken.
PHYSICAL EXAM — STYLE & STRUCTURE
- —Prose and song alternate. Philosophy argues in prose, and the poems that punctuate it carry the images.
- —A dialogue between a despairing prisoner and the Lady Philosophy, who diagnoses him before she treats him.
- —Built on images that stuck: the wheel of Fortune, the two jars at the threshold of Zeus, drunk men looking for home.
- —Philosophy as therapy. The arguments are meant to heal, not only to prove.
- —Argues from Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, but is addressed to a man in pain and is not a school text.
ASSESSMENT & PLAN
The bridge between the ancient guides and the medieval ones. Its Fortune and its definition of eternity are the ground under Dante, who places Boethius among the wise in the Heaven of the Sun. It also answers the Stoic guides from a Platonist's side: Epictetus and Seneca tell the reader to value only what is in his power, and Boethius reaches a similar point by asking what is truly one's own, and ends not in acceptance of fate but in trust in providence. A good way in is Fortune in Book II and the definition of eternity in Book V. For a first read, try Victor Watts (Penguin), P. G. Walsh (Oxford World's Classics) or Joel Relihan (Hackett); the full guide quotes H. R. James's public-domain 1897 translation.