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Book III, Part IX
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
Having explained “perfect good,” Philosophy now hopes to indicate how “perfect happiness is to be found.” First, she notes that all the good things she has talked about thus far are “imperfect” goods that take their limited “proportion of perfection” from perfect good, which can only be possessed by God (because “nothing can be conceived [as] better than God”). Next, she tells Boethius that God’s “supreme good” cannot come “from outside Himself,” because that would mean that the outside source of this good would be superior to God. Indeed, the “supreme good” cannot be “logically distinct from [God],” or else the essence of this “supreme good” would be greater than God. Since “supreme good is the same as happiness,” Philosophy concludes, “God is the essence of happiness.” And there cannot be “two supreme goods,” for “neither could be perfect when each is lacking to the other.”
Both by argument and by demonstration, in the previous song Philosophy began to indicate what humans should do to achieve the “perfect happiness” that God (the “perfect good”) can offer them. But here, she takes up the question explicitly, now using the philosophical method of inquiry. Her potentially confusing point about things’ “proportion of perfection” is merely a way of saying that things besides God are only good because they come from and resemble Him, and is a means of reaffirming that all good in the world comes from God (which later raises the question of where evil comes from). By the end of this passage, then, Philosophy suggests that the following things are all one and the same: God; happiness; the supreme good; and the sum of perfect sufficiency, power, respectableness, glory, and joy.
Themes
Philosophy reestablishes that “supreme happiness is identical with supreme divinity,” and then offers a “corollary” of this conclusion: since happiness and divinity are one and the same, people grow happy “through the possession of divinity,” and divine by possessing happiness.
Philosophy’s “corollary” (meaning a conclusion that follows from what she has already proven) nearly explains what people should actually do to become “supremely happy,” but falls short of clarity. She says that people should try to “possess […] divinity,” but what does this actually mean? There are some things that can be definitively known from what Philosophy has argued so far. First, one cannot “possess[]” God like a material object, and secondly, true happiness must be “possess[ed]” in a way such that it cannot be taken away, because it is of the highest order of good. This means that one cannot give up divinity once one possesses it. Thirdly, Philosophy has previously established that true happiness involves the workings of the mind, and not the body. So taking these points together, it appears that happiness or divinity must involve God forming an inalienable part of someone’s mind or soul. But it remains to be seen precisely how this is possible.
Themes
Philosophy promises Boethius that she has one more “beautiful” conclusion to reveal. First, she asks whether the five things they have equated with happiness—pleasure, power, honor, sufficiency, and glory—are “like parts combining to form a single body,” or if “goodness [is] something superordinate to which they belong.” Since “these [five] things have been proved to be identical,” she concludes, “they are not like limbs,” but rather “are classed under good.” That is, people want these things because of their goodness—indeed, nobody desires anything that does not either have, or appear to have, some semblance of goodness. She concludes that “goodness” motivates all pursuits, and people only desire things “for the sake of the good in them.” Since she has already established “that the reason for desiring things is happiness,” this is another reason to believe that goodness is the same thing as happiness and God.
When she concludes that “goodness [is] something superordinate” to the five dimensions of happiness, Philosophy is just pointing out—as she has already suggested before—that these things are not good in and of themselves, but only good because of their connection to something else, “goodness.” These things are good in the same kind of way that something is red: they do not make up the concept of goodness, just as all the red things in the world do not make up the concept of redness. So redness is “superordinate to” red things, just like goodness is “superordinate to” the five dimensions of happiness. And this is why pursuing them on their own actually leads people to misery: they have no value except through their relationship to goodness—which, in Philosophy’s terms, means God.
Themes
Philosophy sings that those held “captive” by their “false desire” should take up refuge in God, who will offer peace and solace. Riches and worldly pursuits distract people from the divine, but anyone who “see[s God’s] shining light” will immediately see His greater truth.
Philosophy again clearly calls on her and Boethius’s readers to pray to and meditate on God, as she does precisely through this song. The “shining light” continues to represent truth, but is this truth sent down by God, or is it part of (or even identical to) God? This matters because it could help determine if wisdom properly counts as “the possession of divinity,” which is what Philosophy has said is necessary for people to achieve perfect happiness.
Themes
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