Ignatius Reilly's favorite book. What more needs to be said? ( )

Interesting ( )

A 6th century classic on good and evil, fate and freewill, the fickleness of fortune and the nature of happiness, composed while the author was in prison.

It deserves a high rating because it was so influential to other great writers, like Dante, and Boethius' place in history is assured, not just as a writer, but as the deliverer of the Greek classics to the rest of darkened Europe. However, the many great works Boethius has inspired with his Consolation have out-shined him a bit. ( )

Book 1 is an introduction. The narrator (Boethius himself) is imprisoned or under house arrest on a false charge of treason when he has a vision of Philosophy in the form of a woman. His basic questions are why do good things happen to bad people and why me? She says that even to ask such questions are a symptom of a diseased mind.

In book 2, Philosophy argues Fortune's case, which is basically if you accept good things from her you have to accept the bad as well. Philosophy then says that anyway the good things Boethius is complaining about having lost, things like fame, wealth, political power, aren't really good things anyway. His misfortunes have only re-inforced the truly good things like his family ties and knowledge of who his friends really are.

Book 3 continues the argument, saying that what are conventionally considered good things aren't really because they are only partially good. The real good thing which unites the good aspects of other things and which is the only thing which can really make one happy is God.

Book 4 returns to the discussion of why people's fate/fortune bears no relation to their moral merits or lack of. Philosophy argues firstly that bad people's good fortune is only apparent, but in fact they do suffer and become miserable by not having any bad fortune which might serve as a wake up call, while good people suffer bad fortune so that good fortune cannot corrupt them.

The Consolation concludes in Book 5 with a discussion about whether divine omniscience (and divine foreknowledge in particular) precludes free will. Philosophy argues that God views everything from an eternal present which encompasses the whole of this temporal sphere. Thus God knows what we have freely chosen/freely choose/will freely choose all at once, but this is not readily comprehensible to us with our finite, time-bound reason.

Knowing how influential this book was in mediaeval times and right down to our own day (C S Lewis apparently chose it as one of the top ten books which had influenced him most), I was surprised how little of it seemed to be explicitly Christian.

I'm not sure I would recommend this particular edition. The translator's notes fanatically track down every possible source for the ideas expressed or just the wording in ancient philosophers, poets and other writers without really doing very much to help the non-specialist in ancient philosophy to understand the ideas. ( )