Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning and On the Soul

Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning and On the Soul by Cassiodorus

Translated by James H. Halporn; introduction by Mark Vessey

Predating Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon by at least five hundred years, Cassiodorus’s Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning might be the first preserved synthesis of a Christian classical education. His preface laments he was unable to raise sufficient funds for a proper school (due to raging war in Italy), but divine love moved him to devise “with God’s help, these introductory books to take the place of a teacher.” These pages contain a summary of the Holy Scripture as well as philosophy, church history, geography, rhetoric, music, and venerable mention of the Saints Augustine, Jerome, Hilary of Poitiers, and Cyprian. Cassiodorus has been labeled as both savior of classical civilization and historical anachronism. Mark Vessey’s evenhanded introduction reestablishes Cassiodorus and his use of the accumulated texts of his time as “at once exceptional … and resolutely unoriginal.” Cassiodorus’s collection of texts and the paradigm they represent are a laboratory of Christian culture’s formation.