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Essay on Boethius - The Consolation Of Philosophy
The Consolation is an imaginary dialogue between Boethius and Philosophy, a female personification of the tradition of philosophical wisdom which, despite the attempts of different schools to sunder it (her clothes are torn, because each philosophical sect has tried to take some of them for itself), is a unified one, stretching back to Socrates and Plato. Boethius represents himself at the beginning of the dialogue as overcome by grief and self-pity: he bewails the injustice of the accusations against him and the turn of fortune which has brought him from a position of importance to prison; he longs for death to put an end to his suffering.
Philosophy treats him as someone suffering from an illness. The shock of his fall from power has made him forget the wisdom which, from his youth, he had learned from her. He still retains the knowledge (I, prose 6) that there is a God who rules the universe, but he no longer knows to what end all things move. He believes that, whereas the workings of nature follow a rational order, in human affairs the evil are left free to triumph and oppress the good. Philosophy begins with what she calls ‘lighter remedies’, a series of arguments to show him that his personal downfall is not the disaster he takes it to be. In particular, she insists that he cannot blame fortune for instability, since it is the very nature of fortune to be unstable, and of the goods of fortune, such as riches, power, honor and fame, to be transitory.
Boethius is now prepared for Philosophy’s ‘weightier remedy’, her argument about the highest good (bk III). When people seek to obtain the various goods of fortune, she argues, they are motivated by a genuine desire for the good—we desire only what we consider to be good—but are misled by ignorance about the nature of the good...................
