The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius is one of the least known and without a doubt one of the finest books of the Christian Middle Ages. It doesn’t have the size or bulk of St. Augustine’s works or of St. Thomas’ vast treatises. It is short, but in it, Boethius manages to synthesize most of the seminal ideas of Plato and Aristotle and reconcile them with core Christian mysteries at the same time. When the story opens, Boethius is in jail, awaiting his execution and lamenting his fate. Lady Philosophy appears to him, in a gown that’s faded (unused?) and shows signs of wear. She tells Boethius, basically, to stop whining; he’s in the predicament he’s in because in part he reads too much poetry (it has obviously softened him) and because he’s lost a sense of who he is, what his beginnings and end are. He is, she tells him, suffering from a loss of memory, from a kind of anamnesis, a notion that was central to Plato, who believed in a prior state of existence in which man had an immediate apprehension of the Infinite and Uncreated Good; and that was also central to a Christian’s belief in the memorial nature of the Eucharist and an immediate participation in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. The backstory of the work is the Job story: why does God allow evil men to prosper and good men to suffer, but unlike Job, Boethius is martyred, executed for a crime he didn’t commit.  

       The story takes the form of a Socratic dialogue with Lady Philosophy increasing the sophistication and difficulty of her questions as Boethius begins to recover himself and toughen up. Five chapters make up the whole of the book, and they unfold in a prosi-metrical form, alternating sections of prose and verse. The verse sections are intended presumably to ease the strain that Boethius is under in having to make the ascent from where he started to the truth he’ll come to at the end—a high mountain climb of sorts; or if we use Plato’s Cave image, a long strenuous climb out of the cave and into the light of the Sun, the eternal realities of the Good.  

       Each of the book’s chapters deals with a specific stage in Boethius’ arguments, but in terms of the overall whole to which Lady Philosophy takes Boethius and us, the book can be conveniently divided into two parts. The first takes us to the conclusion that there is no bad fortune. If God is good, He’s doing all He can to bring good out of the evil men do. The second part deals with God’s providential character and the tricky question of whether God predestines everything according to His foreknowledge, because if He does, His rewards or punishments are meaningless or at best unjust: does God’s foreknowledge cause a man’s actions? To deal with these matters more fully, Lady Philosophy distinguishes between the knowability (or intelligibility) of something and the mode of the knower, the four different faculties in man: the senses, imagination, reason (ratio, to reason step-by-step), and intelligence (intellectus, to grasp wholes) and the role they play in the act of apprehension. With these principles behind (or beneath) them, she then goes on to consider divine knowledge (for God there is no past or future, only an on-going present, so for Him, there is no fore-knowledge, only a seeing) and likens the differences between the way men and God know to the “still-point” at the center of a circle and the motion at the circumference and outside. The relevance of these distinctions isn’t merely technical or rhetorical because they actually give artists the conceptual or imaginative means by which to take the seemingly random and haphazard events in life and organize them into some meaningful, coherent whole; it also, correlatively, gives readers, teachers, and critics a means by which to explain how all the diverse and varied elements in a work of art can cohere into a whole, can unify into one.