- Length
- 208 pagesWalsh, The Consolation of Philosophy, Oxford World's Classics, 1999
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
The Consolation of Philosophy
The last book of the classical world and the first of the medieval one, written in a cell by a man who had been the most powerful civilian in Italy and had weeks to live. It is a work of consolation that consoles by argument rather than comfort, and it does not mention Christianity once.
- Date
- c. 524
- Author
- Boethius
- Region
- Ostrogothic Italy
- Language
- Latin
- 890 Old English, the circle of King Alfred One of the earliest philosophical texts in English Consensus
- 1385 Middle English, Geoffrey Chaucer The Boece; public domain Attested
- 1593 English, Elizabeth I Made, it is said, in under a month Attested
- 1999 English, P. G. Walsh Current standard; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Solitary — No documented reply on either side
- Form
- Dialogue
- Method
- Dialogue — Argument staged between speakers
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Historical — Read for what it shows about its moment
One of the most read and most translated books in Europe for a thousand years, and translated by a king, a poet laureate and a queen.
What the book says
A dialogue written in prison by a man awaiting execution, alternating prose and verse, in which the prisoner is visited by Philosophy in the form of a woman of uncertain height whose dress has been torn by rival schools taking pieces. She finds him writing self-pitying poetry and tells him it is making things worse. The consolation proceeds by stages. First she diagnoses: he has forgotten what he is, and mistaken gifts of fortune for possessions. Then Fortune speaks in her own voice and points out that she never pretended - the wheel turns, that is what a wheel is, and he took the ride knowing this. Then the argument proper. The things he has lost - wealth, office, fame, power, pleasure - are each shown to be incapable of delivering what people seek in them, and each turns out to be a fragment of a single good they are pursuing badly. That good is God, and happiness is possession of it. The last two books tackle the hard cases: why the wicked prosper, and how human choice can be free if God already knows what we will do. The answer to the second is that God does not foresee in time but sees all times at once, and knowledge does not compel.
What it argues
That the goods people pursue are fragments of one good mistaken for wholes, and that recognising this dissolves the loss. Wealth, honour, power, fame and pleasure each promise sufficiency, respect, security, distinction and contentment, and each fails to deliver even what it promises, let alone the rest; what people are actually pursuing through all five is a single complete good, and that is God. The problem of divine foreknowledge is then answered with a distinction that had a long career: God does not know in advance, because God is not in time at all, and what is seen from eternity is seen as present. Knowledge of an event does not make it necessary; the necessity is in the knowing, not in the thing known.
No work is recorded as the target of this book, and none is recorded as answering it.
How it argues
As a dialogue in alternating prose and verse, with Philosophy conducting a course of treatment that begins with gentler remedies and works up. The prisoner is not a straw man - his complaints are the ones anyone would make and he keeps making them - and the argument advances by his objections rather than around them. That Christianity is nowhere mentioned, in a book by a Christian writing under sentence of death, is the work's most striking feature: the consolation is offered on grounds available to anyone, which is a decision about what philosophy is for.
The moment
Boethius was consul, then master of offices under Theoderic, the Ostrogothic king of Italy - a Roman aristocrat serving an Arian Gothic regime at the moment relations with Constantinople were deteriorating. Accused of treasonable correspondence with the eastern court, he was condemned without a hearing, imprisoned at Pavia and executed. He had planned to translate all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin and reconcile them; he completed part of the Aristotelian logic, and that fragment was most of what the early Middle Ages had.
How it travelled
As a school text and a royal project. It was among the most copied books of the Middle Ages, glossed and commented on continuously, and translated into the vernaculars unusually early: into Old English in the circle of King Alfred, into Middle English by Chaucer, and into English again by Elizabeth I, who is said to have done it in under a month. Its image of Fortune's wheel became the standard European picture of how luck works, appearing in poetry, painting and manuscript illumination for centuries. The eternity solution to foreknowledge passed into scholastic theology and is still discussed.
The strongest objection
That the consolation works only if the argument does, and the argument's central move is the weakest part. The claim that the five goods are fragments of one good depends on the assumption that a complete good exists to be fragments of, which is what the argument was supposed to establish. Philosophy's treatment of the wicked prospering is thinner still - they are said to be punished by being wicked, which is true only on a conception of harm the sufferer would have to accept first. There is also the objection that a man consoled by these arguments would not have needed them, and Boethius, who kept writing until they killed him, is the evidence either way.
Why read it
Because it is short, humane and written under a pressure nothing else in this section matches, and because the circumstances are never mentioned after the first book - a man with weeks to live spends them on whether foreknowledge is compatible with freedom. The verse passages are genuinely good, and the fifth book is one of the clearest pieces of philosophical writing in Latin.
- First printed
- 1473
- First in English
- 1385
- Digitised
- Yes
The manuscript tradition is one of the largest for any Latin work, with hundreds of copies and a dense apparatus of medieval commentary and glossing.
Chaucer's Middle English, Queen Elizabeth I's version of 1593 and the Victorian translations are public domain. Walsh, Watts and Relihan are in copyright.
Where it stands
Historical as a system and permanently present in pieces. Nobody now defends the ascent from partial goods to God as Boethius presents it, but the account of divine eternity as timeless simultaneity remains a live option in philosophy of religion, and the Fortune material is embedded in the culture well beyond anyone who has read the book.
On quoting this book
The Latin is public domain and several old English versions are too, but the readable modern renderings are in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The absence of any Christian reference has been explained as evidence that Boethius had returned to paganism, as a deliberate restriction to what reason alone supplies, and as a generic convention; the discovery of his theological treatises settled that he was Christian and not why the Consolation is silent. Whether he was guilty of the charge is unknown. Whether the arguments are meant to succeed, or whether the reader is to notice that Philosophy cannot quite deliver what she promises, is a genuine minority reading with textual support.