Cassiodorus: Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning

As a minister of the Ostrogothic regime in the time of Theoderic, Cassiodorus had as brilliant a political career as any Roman of the late empire. Around 538 CE, on the eve of the Byzantine reconquest of Italy, he published a collection of his state letters under the title of “Variae” (TTH 12), and disappeared from the public record. Half a century later, dying at his country estate in Calabria, he left behind the exemplars for another world of texts: that of the Christian universe of Scripture, now encompassing the Seven Liberal Arts. The grand plan of this new dispensation is contained in the two books of his “Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning”, a work which would be excerpted and copied in monasteries throughout the Latin Middle Ages. The “Institutions” appears here in the first new English translations since the 1950s, with explanatory notes and a historical and interpretative introduction that takes full account of contemporary scholarship. The treatise “On the Soul” which was originally published as the 13th book of the “Variae”, is included as an appendix.
For a long while mistakenly revered as a saviour of classical civilization, in recent times more often dismissed as an anachronism, Cassiodorus emerges from this edition of the “Institutions” as an exceptionl but nonetheless representative exponent of the learned Christian culture of later Latin antiquity. The work should be of interest to historians of the ate Roaman Empire and the early Christian Church, medievalists and students of the classical tradition.

Author Biography

James W. Halporn is Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies, Indiana University, and currently Associate in Classics, Harvard University. He edited Cassiodorus’s De anima for the Corpus Christianorum. Mark Vessey is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia and holder of a Canada Research Chair in Literature/Christianity and Culture. He is coeditor of The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R.A. Markus and of Holy Scripture Speaks: The Production and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament.