The Consolation of Philosophy

The trouble it addresses

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was born around 477 CE into one of Rome’s great families, after the last western emperor had been deposed. Italy was ruled by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, and Boethius served him at the highest level. He was consul in 510; in 522 both his young sons were made consuls together, an extraordinary honour, and he became head of the royal administration. He was also a scholar who set out to translate all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, and whose translations of Aristotle’s logic shaped the teaching of the subject in Europe for centuries.

Then, within months, he lost everything. Accused of treason, apparently for defending a fellow senator charged with corresponding with the emperor in Constantinople, he was condemned without a proper hearing, imprisoned near Pavia and executed, probably in 524. In prison, awaiting death, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy.

The book’s trouble is his own: the bitterness of a man who has served faithfully and been betrayed, who has lost his wealth, his family’s company and his reputation, and who cannot see how a good God could allow such injustice.

The exercises

The Consolation is a dialogue in five books, alternating prose and verse. It opens with Boethius writing mournful poems, attended by the Muses of poetry. A woman appears, tall and of uncertain age, her robe torn by people who had seized pieces of it. She is Philosophy. She drives away the Muses, who she says only feed his grief, and begins to treat him like a physician, starting with gentle remedies and moving to stronger ones as he can bear them.

Name the complaint. Philosophy first lets Boethius set out his grievances in full. Among them is one that sounds strikingly modern. He complains that people “look not to real merit, but to the event; and only recognise foresight where Fortune has crowned the issue with her approval”. He was judged by how things turned out, not by whether he had acted rightly. Philosophy does not dismiss this. She takes it as the start of the cure.

See Fortune for what she is. In the second book Philosophy speaks in Fortune’s voice. Fortune has never promised to stay. Turning is her nature: “if it takes to standing still, it ceases to be the wheel of Fortune.” Boethius complains of losing gifts that were only ever lent. The exercise is to recognise that wealth, office and reputation belong to Fortune and that she reclaims them when she pleases.

Count what remains. Philosophy then reminds him of what he still has, including a loving father-in-law, a devoted wife and his sons. Many people would think themselves blessed with a fraction of it. “So true is it that nothing is wretched, but thinking makes it so, and conversely every lot is happy if borne with equanimity.”

Look for the good inside. “Why, then, ye children of mortality, seek ye from without that happiness whose seat is only within us?” asks Philosophy. External goods cannot be truly ours because they can be taken, and they never give lasting satisfaction. The third book then argues that what people seek in wealth, power, fame and pleasure is really one thing, a complete and self-sufficient good, which none of them can supply and which Philosophy identifies with God.

Take the view from eternity. The last book takes on the hardest question: if God knows everything in advance, how can human beings be free? Philosophy’s answer is that God does not foresee events as a sequence. Eternity, she says, is “the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment”. God sees all of time at once, as a person on a height sees everything below without causing it. Human choices remain free.

The picture of a life behind them

Boethius was a Christian, yet the Consolation never mentions Christ. Its consolation comes from philosophy, especially from Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. Its picture of a good life is one in which a person’s happiness depends on their relation to the good, which nothing outside them can touch. Fortune can strip away possessions and status but cannot make someone unjust or ignorant against their will.

The book also holds that the world is ordered, even when it seems unjust. Wicked people who appear to flourish are, on Philosophy’s account, the ones truly harmed, because they damage their own souls. That claim is hard to accept, and Boethius the character resists it. The book’s power lies partly in letting his resistance be heard.

For a thousand years the Consolation was one of the most read books in Europe. It was translated into English by King Alfred, by Chaucer and by Queen Elizabeth I, and the image of Fortune’s wheel it popularised shaped medieval art and literature.

Carrying it into ordinary work

Boethius’s complaint about being judged by outcomes is one of the oldest statements of what decision researchers now call outcome bias. The site’s idea page Moral Luck and Outcome Bias traces it. Anyone who leads people faces the temptation to praise decisions that turned out well and blame those that turned out badly, whatever their quality. The Consolation suggests a discipline: judge a decision by what could have been known when it was made, and expect Fortune to have her say.

The exercises also suit setbacks at work: a lost role, a failed company, an unfair review. Separate what was taken from what remains. Count what is still yours. Ask what part of your sense of worth depended on things that were always only lent. Then return, as Philosophy keeps urging Boethius to do, to the part of the situation where you can still act well.