Felsefenin Tesellisi (The Consolation of Philosophy)

De consolatione philosophiae, that is, Felsefenin Tesellisi (The Consolation of Philosophy), is the book Boethius wrote in prison while awaiting death. It was written in Latin and consists of five books. Some sections are prose, some are poetry. This form is called prosimetrum. In my view the mixture in this book is not decoration: as the argument moves forward, poetry steps in and lets you breathe, then the argument continues.

Boethius was born around 480 in Rome, into a noble family called the Anicii. When his father died young, he grew up with Symmachus, who later became his father-in-law. He was consul in 510, and in 522 his two sons were elected consuls together. In the same years he became magister officiorum at the court of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, that is, the senior official at the head of court and state affairs. The book was written around 523, after his arrest. The date of his death varies from source to source: Wikipedia says 524, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives 526 with a question mark. I am not writing a definite year.

Since the book is in the public domain, I based this piece on the text itself: H. R. James's 1897 English translation (freely available on Project Gutenberg) and the entry on Boethius in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I did not read the Latin original, and I did not compare the Turkish translation line by line.

On Kitapyurdu (a Turkish online bookstore), the Kabalcı Yayınları translation by Çiğdem Dürüşken appears: 2006, 398 pages. The publisher presents it as the first Turkish translation made from Latin, and the page says it is out of stock. The same search also turns up a 2025 edition of 270 pages from Alfa Yayınları; I could not verify its translator from the page.

The fallen man, the woman who arrives

The starting point is personal. Boethius was inside power; he defended the former consul Albinus, who was accused of treason, and then he himself was accused of treason and sorcery. In the first book he tells what happened in his own words: he writes that he was accused because he wanted to save the Senate, that he was slandered with forged letters, and that he was sentenced to death without being given a chance to defend himself. As someone who studied law, I think the weight of this part lies in the fact that his defense was not heard while the decision about him was being made.

Then a woman enters the room. One moment she is a person's height, the next her head touches the sky. She wove her dress herself, but the dress is torn; everyone has ripped off a piece and taken it. On its hem there is a Greek P, on its collar a Th, and between the two a ladder. According to the notes, these letters stand for practical and theoretical philosophy. The one who has come is Philosophy herself.

Book one: the Muses are driven out, a diagnosis is made

The first thing the woman does is drive out the Muses at Boethius's bedside who have him write laments in verse. She calls them sirens. I think this is the moment that sets the tone of the book: consolation does not begin by feeding the feeling, it begins by saying that the feeling is being fed from the wrong source.

The woman then wipes his tears with the edge of her dress. Boethius recognizes her; he has grown up under her teaching since childhood. Philosophy tells how her own followers have also come under attack: she lists persecuted philosophers from Socrates to Seneca. Boethius, too, recounts the accusations brought against him one by one, naming names: Cyprian, Basilius, Opilio, Gaudentius.

The diagnosis comes in the sixth section. Philosophy asks him what a human being is. Boethius answers: a rational and mortal creature. Philosophy says: "Thou hast ceased to know thy own nature." (James translation, Book I). The illness has three legs: Boethius has forgotten his own nature, he has forgotten the final end toward which all things move, and he does not understand how the world is governed. Philosophy decides to begin the treatment with gentle remedies, because the patient cannot yet bear strong medicine.

Book two: Fortune defends herself

Here is the most memorable scene in the book. Philosophy gives Fortune the floor, and Fortune pleads her own case: I lent it to you, I am taking it back, you have no right to complain. She gives Croesus and Perseus, king of Macedonia, as examples, mentions Zeus's two jars, and says that turning her wheel is her own nature.

This is a section that stands right next to the countless complaints written in Ottoman divan poetry about "felek" (fate, the heavens) and "çarh" (the wheel of fortune). But here fate appears before you and answers back, and its answer can be defended.

The following sections list what Boethius still has: his father-in-law, who is still alive, his wife, his sons. Wealth is no one's own possession, office falls to the wicked too, and fame means something only in a tiny corner of a world that is no more than a point. The thesis of the eighth section is harsh: bad fortune is more useful than good fortune, because one deceives and the other teaches, and shows who your real friends are. Where the second book arrives is this: happiness cannot be tied to what comes from outside.

Book three: false goods, the one good

In this book Philosophy leaves the gentle remedies behind and moves on to the real treatment. People look for happiness in wealth, office, power, fame and pleasure. A section is devoted to each, and all are tested with the same question: does this thing really make its owner self-sufficient? Wealth creates new needs, office makes the wickedness of the wicked more visible and humiliates them even more, kings fear their own guards, nobility is a reputation that belongs to one's ancestors, pleasure leaves regret.

The turn comes in the ninth section. Self-sufficiency, power, respect, fame and joy are not separate things but the faces of a single thing. What separates them is human error. In the tenth section this single thing is identified with God, and in the eleventh it is said that every being seeks its own good and its own unity. The twelfth section leads to a weighty conclusion: God cannot do evil, God is all-powerful, therefore evil has no real existence.

The book ends with the song of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus brings his wife out of the land of the dead, turns to look back at the threshold of the exit, and loses her. Philosophy reads this as the story of everyone who turns back while walking toward the light.

Book four: why the wicked seem powerful

Here Boethius makes his real objection: if there is a good God, why do the wicked win? Philosophy builds the answer the other way round. Everyone wants the good, only the good can reach it, therefore power belongs to the good and the wicked are powerless. Evil is not a power but a failure. The unhappiness of the wicked grows even greater when they are able to do what they want. Going unpunished is worse than being punished.

In the third section there is the song of Circe: Odysseus's men are turned into pigs. Philosophy turns this into a moral claim: a person who sinks into wickedness stops being human. He comes to resemble the greedy wolf, the quarrelsome dog, the cunning fox, the lustful pig. In the fourth section Philosophy suggests treating the wrongdoer as a patient rather than with anger, because the one who does injustice is more to be pitied than the one who suffers it.

The sixth section separates Providence from Fate: Providence is the divine reason itself, unchanging and simple. Fate is the same order unfolded in time. The image of concentric circles is here: what is closer to the center is freer from fate, what is closer to the outside is more bound. The claim of the seventh section is unsettling: every fortune either rewards the good, tests them or corrects them, or punishes the wicked, so every fortune is good. Philosophy herself admits that most people will find this conclusion contrary to what they think.

Book five: chance, free will, eternal knowledge

The last book works on two things together. First, chance: Philosophy relies on Aristotle's definition; chance is not something without a cause but the intersection of two separate causes. The example of the farmer who finds buried gold while plowing his field is here. Then comes the question of free will. In the third section Boethius states the objection clearly: if God knows everything in advance without error, what will happen is necessary, and then freedom, reward, punishment and prayer become meaningless.

In the fourth section Philosophy looks for the answer in the structure of knowledge: what is known is grasped according to the faculty of the knower. The same round object is perceived as a whole by the eye and piece by piece by touch. Sense, imagination, reason and intuitive understanding are built one on top of the other. The conclusion comes in the sixth section: to be eternal is to possess endless life whole and complete in a single moment. God does not predict the future in advance; God sees it in a present outside of time. Conditional necessity and absolute necessity are separated: seeing someone walking does not force them to walk. The book closes with a call to choose virtue before a judge who sees everything.

Its strongest points

First, the order of treatment. Philosophy starts gently, leaves the heavy part for later, and moves on to the next step when she sees the patient is ready. I think it resembles the order in which a good therapist works.

Second, the Fortune section. The most reliable response to pain is not self-pity but telling apart what was on loan. That distinction still works today.

Third, the form. When the argument gets heavy, poetry steps in, and every song becomes a place to catch your breath. The song of Orpheus does what an argument cannot do and closes the third book.

Weaknesses and criticisms

That Christianity does not appear in the book is a subject of debate in itself. Boethius had also written separate treatises on Christian theology; but there is no explicit Christian doctrine in this book. According to the Stanford entry, there are several ways to read this: to take the text as it is, as a philosophical testament, or to read it as a game that hints that Philosophy's authority is incomplete. Relihan's ironic reading stays at the extreme. According to Marenbon's measured reading, Boethius agrees with Philosophy's arguments but also shows that Philosophy falls short in grasping God. I do not think this debate has been definitively closed.

The arguments are not without problems either. Some commentators read the argument about eternal knowledge in the fifth book as a scope error, others as a transcendental argument. The account of fate gives the impression that the will is determined by causes. The Stanford entry also draws attention to the gap between the claim that happiness is God and the claim that good action leads to the good.

And I have an objection of my own. Philosophy reminds Boethius of what he still has and admits that pain comes most of all from having once been happy, but I think she moves past the pain quickly. For someone who has just suffered a loss, returning to argument within two pages can feel harsh.

There is no ADHD in this book. The effect of structured programs run with a therapist has been tested. But I do not know of any study showing that reading a philosophy book reduces ADHD symptoms. I explained this distinction in more detail in the article on cognitive behavioral therapy.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

For the reader who has gone through a loss, an injustice or a fall and wants to think about how much of it was in their own hands. The first three books are enough for that. Also for someone interested in the history of philosophy who wants to read one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages in its own text.

It calls for short-breathed, fragmented reading: a prose section, then a poem. It is not a book you read in one sitting. The poems can sometimes make you impatient; you can skip them, but the rhythm of the book is built with them.

For someone who has just been diagnosed and is in a period of grief, it may still be too early. In such a period, the article on grief after diagnosis is a more suitable place to start.

Its place on the shelf

On the philosophy shelf, its closest neighbor is Kendime Düşünceler (Meditations). Marcus writes to himself; Boethius draws someone else's voice out from within himself. Both are men who knew power and wrote about its transience. Camus's Sisifos Söyleni (The Myth of Sisyphus) is barer: there, nobody comes to diagnose the illness.

Aristotle's Nikomakhos'a Etik (Nicomachean Ethics) also sits close by: in the third book Boethius answers the question of what happiness is by another road, on his own terms. In the diary, the pieces on eudaimonia and anamnesis can be read side by side with the idea of recollection in the eleventh poem of the third book. Amor fati, on the other hand, enters the Fortune section through another door.

My take

I keep this book not as a book of consolation but as a book of diagnosis. Philosophy does not tell the one who is crying "it will pass"; she says "you have forgotten yourself." That is a harder sentence, and it works for longer. I do not agree with all of Boethius's answers, but the fact that he asked the question from the right place matters in itself.