ARKCODEX
The Consolation of Philosophy
1I once composed poems when my art was in full flower. Now I am forced — how bitterly — to turn to mournful songs. My wounded Muses dictate what I must write. Genuine tears stream down my face as I write these elegies. At least no threat could overcome them. They refused to abandon me on my journey. The glory of a once-happy and vigorous youth now brings some comfort to an old man grieving his fate. Old age arrived ahead of its time. It came without warning, driven here by suffering. Sorrow commanded that its season become mine. White hairs pour untimely from the crown of my head. Loose skin trembles over a body that has nothing left to give. Death is a blessing to the man it claims before the sweet years are gone. It comes readily when the wretched call for it in grief. But how cruelly it turns away from the miserable, deaf to every cry. It is merciless. It refuses to close their weeping eyes. When treacherous Fortune was deceiving me with her fragile gifts, she nearly dragged me under. Now she has shifted her deceptive face from sunshine to cloud. My cursed life drags on through days I do not want. Why did you call me fortunate so many times, my friends? A man who has fallen was never standing on solid ground.
2While I was turning these thoughts over in silence and setting down my tearful complaint with the help of my pen, a woman appeared to be standing over me. Her face commanded deep reverence. Her eyes burned with a keenness far beyond ordinary human sight. Her color was fresh and her energy was inexhaustible. Yet she was so full of years that no one could have taken her for a woman of our own age. Her height was impossible to pin down. One moment she seemed to hold herself to ordinary human stature. The next, she appeared to strike the sky with the crown of her head. When she lifted her head higher still, she pierced the sky itself and vanished from the sight of anyone who tried to look up at her. Her garments were woven from the finest threads by a hand of consummate skill. The cloth was imperishable. She had made it herself with her own hands, as she later told me. A kind of shadow had settled over it, the shadow that gathers on images long abandoned to neglect. At the lower hem of her robe the Greek letter Pi was woven in. At the upper edge the letter Theta. Between the two letters a series of steps could be seen marked out like the rungs of a ladder. They traced a path of ascent from the lower letter to the higher. Yet the same garment had been torn by the hands of certain violent men. Each of them had seized what piece he could carry away. In her right hand she carried books. In her left hand she held a scepter. When she caught sight of the poetic Muses standing beside my bed and dictating words to match my weeping, she was stirred. Her eyes blazed with severity. She spoke. "Who has allowed these theatrical harlots to approach this sick man? They do not soothe his suffering with any remedy. They feed it with sweet poison. These are the creatures who strangle the rich harvest of reason with the barren thorns of passion. They do not free the human mind from its sickness. They break it to that sickness. If their flattery were leading astray some man untouched by learning, as they are commonly accustomed to do, I would count it a lesser evil. Our work would lose nothing in such a man. But this man has been nourished on the schools of Elea and the Academy." She turned back to them. "Be gone. You are sweet only to those you destroy. Leave him to my Muses to be cared for and healed." At her rebuke the company of Muses dropped their eyes to the ground in shame. Their blush confessed their guilt. They left the threshold in sadness. My own sight was drowned in tears and I could not make her out clearly. I did not know who this woman was or what authority she held over me. I was struck still. I fixed my eyes on the ground and waited in silence to see what she would do next. Then she drew closer and sat down on the edge of my bed. She looked at my face, heavy with grief and cast downward in sorrow. She spoke in verse to mourn the disorder that had overtaken my mind.
3Alas, how the mind sinks into the rushing deep. It grows dull and abandons its own light. It strains toward outer darkness. Earthly winds swell it. Harmful worry swells beyond all measure. Once this mind moved freely under open sky. It was accustomed to traveling the paths of heaven. It watched the light of the rosy sun. It observed the stars of the cold moon. It traced every wandering star that turns through its varied courses along bending orbits. It had mastered all of this in the victory of number. More than that, it searched out the causes of things. It asked why howling winds churn the surface of the sea. It asked what spirit turns the stable sphere of the world. It asked why a star rises in the glowing east only to fall into the western waves. It asked what gentles the mild hours of spring. It asked how spring adorns the earth with rosy flowers. It asked who ordained that rich autumn flows in at the full turn of the year, heavy with swelling grapes. The mind made a habit of this searching. It drew out the hidden causes of nature one by one. Now it lies fallen, the light of the mind burned out. Heavy chains press down upon its neck. The weight of those chains forces its gaze downward. It is compelled, alas, to stare at the dumb earth.
4Then she turned her full gaze on me. "Are you really the one," she said, "who was once nourished at my breast. Who was raised on my teaching. Who grew into the strength of a mature mind?" We had given you weapons. Had you not thrown them away first, they would have protected you with unbreakable force. "Do you recognize me? Why are you silent? Is it shame that silences you, or shock? I would prefer shame. But as I can see, shock has overwhelmed you." She saw that I was not merely silent. I was utterly without words. Without voice. She gently placed her hand on my chest. "There is no danger," she said. "He is suffering from lethargy. It is the common disease of deceived minds. He has lost himself for a time. He will find himself again easily enough. He knew us before. So that this may happen, let us wipe away the cloud of earthly things that darkens his eyes." She said this. She gathered her robe into a fold. She dried my eyes, which were streaming with tears.
5Then the darkness broke apart and left me in the night. The strength returned to my eyes. It was like when storm winds hurl the clouds together. The sky goes still beneath the flooding rain. The sun is buried. No stars have yet come through. Night pours itself down over all the earth. Then Boreas comes roaring out of his cave in Thrace. He batters the sky and tears the day back open. The sun blazes out. Light strikes like a spear. And the dazzled eyes take the blow.
6The clouds of grief dissolved. I breathed in the open air and gathered my mind enough to look clearly at the face of the one tending to me. I turned my eyes toward her and held my gaze steady. Then I recognized her. She was Philosophy. She was the nurse I had lived beside since my youth. "What brings you here," I said, "to this lonely place of my exile? You are the teacher of all the virtues. Have you descended from your high seat to come to me? Or have you come to stand accused alongside me on these false charges?" "Should I abandon you, my student?" she replied. "Should I refuse to share the burden you are carrying — a burden brought on by hatred of my very name? Philosophy does not leave the innocent to walk alone. Should I fear being charged myself? Should I tremble as though something new were happening? Do you think this is the first time wisdom has been attacked by corrupt men and put in danger? Even in ancient times, long before Plato, we fought great battles against the recklessness of foolishness. In Plato's own day, while he still lived, his teacher Socrates earned his victory over an unjust death — and I was standing there beside him. After that, the crowds of Epicureans and Stoics and the rest came and tried to seize his inheritance, each claiming their own share. They dragged me along as part of the plunder despite my protests. They tore the garment I had woven with my own hands. They ripped pieces from it and walked away convinced they had taken all of me. Because those scraps still carried some trace of my appearance, some people foolishly mistook those men for my true companions. That same foolishness misled certain ones of them and corrupted them through the errors of the ignorant crowd. Perhaps you do not know the flight of Anaxagoras, or the poison given to Socrates, or the tortures of Zeno, because they are foreign to your world. But you could have known Canius. You could have known Seneca. You could have known Soranus. Their memory is neither ancient nor obscure. Nothing brought them to ruin except this — they were shaped by my ways and their lives looked nothing like the lives of wicked men. So there is nothing to wonder at if we are tossed about on the stormy sea of this life by winds blowing from every direction. Our greatest offense in the eyes of the worst men is simply that we exist. Their army is large. But it deserves only contempt. It has no commander. It is driven blindly and at random by nothing but delusion. When that army presses hard against us in force and seems to have the upper hand, our leader gathers her forces into the citadel. The enemy busies itself looting baggage that is worthless. We look down from above and laugh. We let them scramble for the least of things. We are safe from the whole furious uproar. We are protected by a wall that no advancing foolishness is ever permitted to reach.
7Here is the passage in clear modern English: Whoever has lived with a calm and ordered life. Whoever has placed proud fate beneath his feet. Whoever has faced both sides of fortune and stood straight. That person has learned to keep an undefeated face. The rage of the ocean will not shake him. Not even when the sea churns itself up from the very bottom. Vesuvius will not shake him. Not even when it bursts open its vents and hurls its smoking fires into the sky. Lightning will not shake him. Not even the path of burning lightning that strikes the tallest towers. Why do wretched people stand in awe of cruel tyrants? These tyrants rage and rage. But all their fury has no real force behind it. Want nothing from a tyrant. Fear nothing from a tyrant. You will have stripped his powerless anger of every weapon it has. But the person who trembles with dread or burns with longing. That person has no firm ground to stand on. That person belongs to no one. That person has thrown away his shield. He has stepped out of his position. He has woven the very chain by which he will be dragged away.
8'Do you feel this?' she asked. 'Does it sink into your mind? Or are you the donkey at the lyre? Why do you weep? Why do the tears pour down? "Speak out. Hide nothing in your heart." If you want a healer's help, you must uncover the wound.' Then I gathered what strength I had and spoke. 'Does Fortune's cruelty still need pointing out? Does it not speak loudly enough on its own? Does the very place move you nothing? This is the library. You chose it yourself as your surest home among our household gods. Here you often sat beside me. Here we talked of the knowledge of things human and divine. This was your bearing and your face when we searched out nature's secrets together. When you traced the paths of the stars for me with your rod. When you shaped my character and my whole way of living after the pattern of the heavenly order. Is this the reward we bring back to you for following where you led? And yet you gave your sanction through Plato's own mouth to this principle: that states would be blessed if those who loved wisdom governed them. Or if those who governed them happened to turn to wisdom. Through that same man's mouth you warned that wisdom makes it necessary for philosophers to enter public life. Otherwise the helm of cities would be left to corrupt and shameless men. And they would bring ruin upon the good and destruction upon all. Following that authority, I sought to carry into the work of public service what I had learned from you in the quiet of our private hours. You are my witness. And so is the god who planted you in the minds of the wise. Nothing brought me to office but the shared desire for the good of all. From that came my deep and unyielding conflict with the wicked. And from that came what a free conscience always brings: the offence of the powerful, courted by me, always and deliberately, for the sake of justice. How many times did I step forward to block Conigastus when he moved against the fortune of some helpless man. How many times did I drive Triguilla, steward of the royal household, away from wrongs he had already begun or fully carried out. How many times did I shield with my own authority, at my own risk, those wretched men whom the barbarians' greed tormented without end and without punishment. No one ever pulled me from right into wrong. I grieved for the ruin of the provincials' fortunes, whether by private plunder or public taxation, no less than those who suffered it themselves. When a cruel famine came and a ruinous and inescapable forced purchase seemed set to lay Campania waste, I took up the fight against the praetorian prefect for the sake of the common good. I argued the case before the king's own knowledge. I won. The forced purchase was not enforced. Paulinus, a man of consular rank whose wealth the hounds of the Palace had already swallowed in hope and scheming, I pulled from their open and eager jaws. To save Albinus, also of consular rank, from the punishment of a verdict decided before it was given, I set myself against the hatred of the informer Cyprian. Are these not large enough quarrels to have stored up against me? But I should have been safer among the rest, since for love of justice I kept nothing back among the courtiers that might have kept me safe. Who then were the informers who struck me down? One of them, Basilius, was driven from royal service and forced into denouncing my name by the pressure of another man's debt. Opilio and Gaudentius had been ordered into exile by royal decree for fraud beyond counting. They refused to obey and sheltered themselves in sanctuary. When this came to the king's notice, he decreed that if they did not leave Ravenna by a fixed day, they would be branded on the forehead and driven out. What could be added to that severity? And yet on that very day those same men's denunciation of my name was accepted. Did my conduct deserve this? Or did their prior condemnation make them righteous accusers? Did Fortune feel no shame? Not for the innocent man accused, if nothing else, then at least for the worthlessness of those who accused him. You want the sum of what I am charged with? I am said to have wished the Senate well. You want the detail? I am accused of having prevented an informer from producing documents that would have made the Senate guilty of treason. What then is your judgment, my teacher? Shall I deny the charge, so as not to be a cause of shame to you? But I did wish it. I have never stopped wishing it and I never will. Shall I confess it? But the work of stopping the informer came to nothing. Shall I call it a crime to have desired the safety of that order? The king himself had made it a crime through his decrees against me. But self-deceiving ignorance cannot change the true nature of things. And I do not believe it is right for me by Socrates' own judgment to hide the truth or to give ground to a lie. However this stands, I leave the judgment of it to you and to the wise. I have also committed the full account and the truth of the matter to writing, so that it cannot be hidden from those who come after. As for the forged letters by which I am accused of having hoped for Roman liberty, what need is there to say more? Their fraud would have been laid bare if I had been allowed to use the confessions of the informers themselves. That carries the greatest weight in every case. What hope of liberty remains anyway? Would that any could. I would have answered with the words of Canius. When Gaius Caesar, son of Germanicus, told him he had known of a plot being formed against Caesar himself, Canius said: 'If I had known, you would not have.' In all this, grief has not so dulled my senses that I complain of what wicked men have attempted against virtue. What strikes me with amazement is that they have brought it off. For to wish for worse things may be a failing of our own nature. But to be able to prevail against innocence, whatever a criminal may conceive in his heart, with God looking on: that is a thing like a portent. One of your own household had reason enough to ask: 'If God exists, where does evil come from? And if he does not, where does good come from?' But let it pass that godless men who thirst for the blood of all good men and of the whole Senate should have wished to destroy me, whom they saw defending the good and the Senate. That much may be understood. But did I deserve the same from the fathers themselves? You remember, I think, since you were always there to guide what I would say and do, you remember, I say, at Verona, when the king in his hunger for general destruction was moving to extend the charge of treason laid against Albinus to the whole body of the Senate: with what complete disregard for my own danger I defended the innocence of the Senate entire. You know I speak the truth. You know I never made a boast of it in praising myself. For the secret of an approving conscience is diminished in some way whenever a man receives the coin of fame by displaying what he has done. But you see what end received our innocence. In place of the rewards of true virtue, we suffer the punishment of a false crime. And has any open confession of any crime ever found judges so united in severity that not some among them were moved to mercy, either by the natural error of human judgment or by the condition of fortune, uncertain as it is for all mortals? If men were accused of having wished to set holy buildings on fire, of having cut down priests with a godless sword, of having plotted the death of all good men, even then a sentence would have punished them in the presence of the court, after confession or conviction. Now, nearly five hundred miles away, silent and undefended, we are condemned to death and confiscation for too warm a zeal toward the Senate. No one could be convicted of a charge like this and shown to deserve it. The very men who brought the accusation saw its dignity. To darken it with the stain of some real crime, they lied and said I had polluted my conscience with sacrilege in pursuit of high office. And yet you yourself drove out of the seat of my soul every desire for mortal things. In your sight, sacrilege had no place. Every day you poured into my ears and my thoughts that Pythagorean word: follow God. Nor was it fitting for me to seek the protection of the vilest spirits, when you were forming me toward that excellence that would make me like to God. Beyond this, my household kept its innocence within its walls. The company of my most honourable friends. My father-in-law, holy and as worthy of reverence as you yourself: all of these defend me from every suspicion of this crime. But the outrage is this: they take their belief in so great a crime against you from you yourself. And I shall seem to have been party to wickedness for this reason alone: that I am steeped in your learning and shaped by your teaching. So it is not enough that
9You are the maker of the star-filled sky. You rest upon your eternal throne. You spin the heavens with a rushing force. You compel the stars to obey your law. At one moment the moon rises full and bright. She moves to meet her brother's fire head-on. She drowns the lesser stars in her light. At the next moment she rises pale and crescent. She draws close to the sun. She loses her light entirely. Hesperus comes out in the early dark of night. His cold rising signals the evening hour. Then he changes his reins and becomes another. Lucifer rises pale at dawn. He fades before the face of the sun. In the freezing cold of leaf-fall winter you shorten the hours of light. When burning summer arrives you cut the night into swift and fleeting hours. Your power governs the turning of the year. The breath of the north wind strips the leaves away. Then the mild west wind brings them back. The seeds that Arcturus watched over at planting time are scorched by Sirius into tall summer grain. Nothing that exists breaks free from its ancient law. Everything holds to its appointed place. Everything is guided toward its certain end. Yet you refuse to govern one thing by the same rule. You refuse to govern the acts of men. Why does slippery Fortune spin such wild reversals? The guilty man's punishment falls on the innocent instead. Twisted and corrupt men sit high on thrones. The wicked grind the necks of the holy beneath their feet. The order is upside down. Virtue lies buried in darkness. No one sees it. The just man bears the blame of the unjust. Perjury causes no harm to those who commit it. Fraud wears a painted face of lies and walks away unscathed. But when the powerful decide to use their strength they rejoice in bringing down the greatest kings. Countless peoples tremble at those kings' names. Look down now on this wretched earth. Whoever you are that binds the laws of the world together — look down. We human beings are no small part of this great work. Yet here we are. Tossed on Fortune's sea. Ruler — calm these raging waves. Fix the earth with the same law by which you hold the vast heavens firm.
10When I had poured out these complaints in unbroken grief, she looked at me with a calm expression, unmoved by my protests. "When I saw you weeping in misery," she said, "I knew at once you were wretched and in exile. But how far that exile extended, I did not know until your own words revealed it. Yet you have not truly been driven from your homeland. You have wandered from it. And if you prefer to think of yourself as banished, know this: you banished yourself. No one else could ever have done that to you. If you recall the city where you were born, it is not governed as Athens once was, by the rule of the crowd. There, one alone is ruler, one alone is king. He rejoices in the company of his citizens, not in driving them away. To be guided by his reins and to submit to his justice — that is the highest freedom. Surely you know the most ancient law of your true city: whoever chooses to make his home there cannot be exiled. There is no danger of exile for anyone held within its walls and defenses. But whoever ceases to want to live there forfeits, equally, all right to belong there. So it is not this place that troubles me. It is your face. I do not look for walls dressed in ivory and glass. I look for the dwelling place of your mind — where I once placed not books, but the ideas that give books their worth. You spoke truthfully about your service to the common good. But given everything you did, you said little. You recalled what everyone already knows about the charges brought against you — their baselessness, their dishonesty. You were right to touch only briefly on the crimes and schemes of your accusers. Those are better and more fully kept alive by the voice of the people who witnessed them all. You denounced the injustice of the Senate's action with force. You grieved over the accusations laid against me. You mourned the damage done to your good name. And finally, your anger rose against Fortune herself — that the rewards given were not equal to the merits earned. At the very end, you sent up a prayer to the savage Muse: that the peace which governs heaven might govern the earth as well. But a great storm of emotions has settled over you. Grief, anger, and sorrow are pulling you in different directions. In the state your mind is in now, stronger remedies cannot yet reach you. So for a time, I will use gentler ones — so that what has hardened under the pressure of your distress may soften at a lighter touch, and become ready to receive medicine of greater strength."
11When the heavy constellation of Cancer blazes under the rays of the sun. The farmer who trusted his seeds to soil that refused them. He walks away deceived by Ceres. He walks to the oak trees to find what food he can. Never go to a purple grove looking for violets to pick. Not when the field is shuddering and shrieking under savage northern winds. Do not reach out with a greedy hand to strip the young shoots of spring. Not if it is grapes you want to enjoy. Bacchus brings his gifts in autumn. That is when he has always brought them. God marks out the seasons. He fits each one to its proper work. He does not allow the boundaries he himself has set to be crossed and confused. Whatever abandons the true order by forcing its way ahead. It does not end well.
12First, then, will you allow me to probe and test the state of your mind with a few questions? That way I can understand what kind of treatment you need. "Ask whatever you like," I said. "I'll answer as best I can." Then she said: "Do you believe this world is driven by random chance and accident? Or do you believe some guiding reason governs it?" "I would never think," I said, "that something so ordered could be moved by blind chance. I know that God presides over his creation as its maker. No day will ever come that shakes me from that truth." "That is so," she said. "You even sang as much a little while ago. What you mourned was only this: that human beings alone were left outside divine care. As for everything else being governed by reason, you had no doubt about that at all." "But how remarkable! I am deeply amazed that someone holding so sound a belief can still be sick. Let us look deeper. I suspect something is missing." "Tell me this: since you have no doubt that God governs the world, do you also notice by what instruments he governs it?" "I barely grasp what your question means," I said. "Much less can I answer it." "Was I wrong," she said, "to sense that something was missing? That through a gap in your defenses, the sickness of confusion crept into your mind?" "Tell me: do you remember what the end of all things is? Where the whole of nature is tending?" "I had heard," I said. "But grief has dulled my memory." "And do you know where all things came from?" "Yes," I said. I answered that it was God. "Then how can it be that you know the beginning and yet do not know the end of all things?" "These disturbances of the mind have their own power. They can move a man from his footing. But they cannot uproot him completely and tear him entirely from himself." "I would like you to answer this as well: do you remember that you are a man?" "Of course I remember," I said. "Then can you say what a man is?" "Are you asking whether I know that I am a rational and mortal animal? I know it. I confess that is what I am." "Do you know yourself to be anything else?" she asked. "Nothing." "Now I know," she said, "another cause of your sickness — and perhaps the greatest one. You have forgotten what you are." "This is why I have found the fullest account of both your illness and the way back to health." "Because you are lost in forgetfulness of yourself, you have grieved as though you were an exile stripped of everything that belongs to you. Because you do not know where all things are going, you think wicked and worthless men are powerful and fortunate. Because you have forgotten by what instruments the world is governed, you think these turns of fortune drift without a helmsman." "These are causes enough not only for sickness but for death." "Yet give thanks to the author of your healing: nature has not abandoned you entirely. We have in you the greatest spark of your recovery — your true belief about the governance of the world. You believe it rests not on blind chance but on divine reason. So fear nothing. From this one small glowing ember, the warmth of life has already begun to shine for you." "But the time for stronger remedies has not yet come. It is the nature of minds that have collapsed that whenever they cast off truth, they clothe themselves in false beliefs. From those false beliefs rises the fog of confusion that obscures true sight." "So I will try for a while to thin that darkness with gentle and moderate treatments. Then, once the shadows of these deceiving passions are cleared away, you will be able to recognize the brilliance of the true light."
13Dark clouds cover the stars. They shed no light at all. When the stormy south wind churns the sea, the waves turn wild. The water that just moments ago was clear and calm as a bright day now runs thick with mud. It blocks the eye from seeing through. The stream that tumbles down from the high mountains is often stopped. A boulder breaks loose from the cliff and bars its way. You too, if you want to see truth by clear light and walk the straight path, then drive out joy. Drive out fear. Send hope away. Let no grief be present either. The mind is clouded. The mind is bound in chains. These passions are its rulers.