“Labour ennobles the human race and completes it with the fruits of genius; but idleness deadens the mind. Not experience, but ignorance, of labour turns us from it. For what man who has made trial of labour has ever forsaken it? And the power of the mind lies in keeping the mind tense; to unstring it is to ruin it. My fixed intention, if the potent favour of the deity will so grant, is (although others have laboured in this field, yet not with satisfactory method) to translate into Latin every work of Aristotle that comes to my hand, and furnish it with a Latin commentary. Thus I may present, well ordered and illustrated with the light of comment, whatever subtilty of logic’s art, whatever weight of moral experience, and whatever insight into natural truth, may be gathered from Aristotle. And I mean to translate all the dialogues of Plato, or reduce them in my commentary to a Latin form. Having accomplished this, I shall not have despised the opinions of Aristotle and Plato if I evoke a certain concord between them and show in how many things of importance for philosophy they agree—if only life and leisure last. But now let us return to our subject.”[102]
One sees a veritable love of intellectual labour and a love of the resulting mental increment. It is distinctly the antique, not the patristic, attitude towards interests of the mind. In spite of his unhappy sixth century way of writing, and the mental fallings away indicated by it, Boëthius possessed the old pagan spirit, and shows indeed how tastes might differ in the sixth century. He never translated the whole of Aristotle and Plato; and his idea of reconciling the two evinces the shallow eclectic spirit of the closing pagan times. Nevertheless, he carried out his purpose to the extent of rendering into Latin, with abundant comment, the entire Organon, that is, all the logical writings of Aristotle. First of all, and with elaborate explanation, he rendered Porphyry’s famous Introduction to the Categories of the Master. Then the Categories themselves, likewise with abundant explanation. Then Aristotle’s De interpretatione, in two editions, the first with simple comment suited to beginners, the second with the best elaboration of formal logic that he could devise or compile.[103] These elementary portions of the Organon, as transmitted in the Boëthian translations, made the logical discipline of the mediaeval schools until the latter part of the twelfth century. He translated also Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistical Elenchi. But such advanced treatises were beyond the requirements of the early mediaeval centuries. With the lessening of intellectual energy they passed into oblivion, to re-emerge only when called for by the livelier mental activities of a later time.
The list of Boëthius’s works is not yet exhausted, for he wrote some minor logical treatises, and a voluminous commentary on Cicero’s Topica. He was probably the author of certain Christian theological tracts, themselves less famous than the controversy which long has raged as to their authorship.[104] If he wrote them, he did but make polite obeisance to the ruling intellectual preoccupations of the time.
Boëthius’s commentaries reproduced the comments of other commentators,[105] and he presents merely the logical processes of thought. But these, analyzed and tabulated, were just the parts of philosophy to be seized by a period whose lack of mental originality was rapidly lowering to a barbaric frame of mind. The logical works of Boëthius were formal, pedantic, even mechanical. They necessarily presented the method rather than the substance of philosophic truth. But their study would exercise the mind, and they were peculiarly adapted to serve as discipline for the coming centuries, which could not become progressive until they had mastered their antique inheritance, including this chief method of presenting the elemental forms of truth.
The “life and leisure” of Boëthius were cut off by his untimely death. Cassiodorus, although a year or two older, outlived him by half a century. He was born at Squillace, a Calabrian town which looks out south-easterly over the little gulf bearing the same name. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been generals and high officials. He himself served for forty years under Theodoric and his successors, and at last became praetorian praefect, the chief office in the Gothic Roman kingdom.[106] Through his birth, his education, his long official career, and perhaps his pliancy, he belonged to both Goths and Romans, and like the great king whom he first served, stood for a policy of reconcilement and assimilation of the two peoples, and also for tolerance as between Arian and Catholic.
Some years after Theodoric’s death, when the Gothic kingdom had passed through internecine struggles and seemed at last to have fallen before the skill of Belisarius, Cassiodorus forsook the troubles of the world. He retired to his birthplace Squillace, and there in propitious situations founded a pleasant cloister for coenobites and an austerer hermitage for those who would lead lives of arduous seclusion. For himself, he chose the former. It was the year of grace 540, three years before the death of Benedict of Nursia. Cassiodorus was past sixty. In retiring from the world he followed the instinct of his time, yet temperately and with an increment of wisdom. For he was the first influential man to recognize the fitness of the cloister for the labours of the pious student and copyist. It is not too much to regard him as the inaugurator of the learned, compiling, commenting and transcribing functions of monasticism. Not only as a patron, but through his own works, he was here a leader. His writings composed after his retirement represent the intellectual interests of western monasticism in the last half of the sixth century. They indicate the round of study proper for monks; just the grammar, the orthography, and other elementary branches which they might know; just the history with which it behoved them to be acquainted; and then, outbulking all the rest, those Scriptural studies to which they might well devote their lives for the sake of their own and others’ souls.
In passing these writings in review, it is unnecessary to pause over the interesting collection of letters—Variae epistolae—which were the fruit of Cassiodorus’s official life, before he shut the convent’s outer door against the toils of office. He “edited” them near the close of his public career. Before that ended he had made a wretched Chronicon, carelessly and none too honestly compiled. He had also written his Gothic History, a far better work. It survives only in the compend of the ignorant Jordanes, a fact the like of which will be found repeatedly recurring in the sixth and following centuries, when a barbaric mentality continually prefers the compend to the larger and better original, which demands greater effort from the reader. A little later Cassiodorus composed his De anima, a treatise on the nature, qualities, and destinies of the Soul. Although made at the request of friends, it indicated the turning of the statesman’s interest to the matters occupying his latter years, during which his literary labours were guided by a paternal purpose. One may place it with the works coming from his pen in those thirty years of retirement, when study and composition were rather stimulated than disturbed by care of his convent and estates, the modicum of active occupation needed by an old man whose life had been passed in the management of State affairs. Its preface sets out the topical arrangement in a manner prophetic of scholastic methods:
“Let us first learn why it is called Anima; secondly, its definition; thirdly, its substantial quality; fourthly, whether any form should be ascribed to it; fifthly, what are its moral virtues; sixthly, its natural powers (virtutes naturales) by which it holds the body together; seventhly, as to its origin; eighthly, where is its especial seat; ninthly, as to the body’s form; tenthly, as to the properties of the souls of sinners; eleventhly, as to those of the souls of the just; and twelfthly, as to the resurrection.”[107]
The short treatise which follows is neither original nor penetrating. It closes with an encomium on the number twelve, with praise of Christ and with a prayer.
Soon after Cassiodorus had installed himself in Vivaria, as he called his convent, from the fishponds and gardens surrounding it, he set himself to work to transcribe the Scriptures, and commenced a huge Commentary on the Psalms. But he interrupted these undertakings in 543 in order to write for his monks a syllabus of their sacred and secular education. The title of the work was Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum.[108] In opening he refers to his failure to found a school of Christian teaching at Rome, on account of the wars. Partially to repair this want, he will compose an introduction to the study of Scripture and letters. It will not set out his own opinions, but those of former men. Through the expositions of the Fathers we ascend to divine Scripture, as by a ladder. The proper order is for the “tiros of Christ” first to learn the Psalms, and then proceed to study the rest of Scripture in carefully corrected codices. When the “soldiers of Christ” have completed the reading of Scripture, and fixed it in their minds by constant meditation, they will begin to recognize passages when cited, and be able to find them. They should also know the Latin commentators, and even the Greek, who have expounded the various books.