Commentary on the Psalms.
(1) He began and slowly completed a Commentary on the Psalms. This very diffuse performance (which occupies more than five hundred closely printed pages in Migne's edition) displays, in the opinion of those who have carefully studied it[84], a large amount of acquaintance with the writings of the Fathers, and was probably looked upon as a marvel of the human intellect by the Vivarian monks, for whose benefit it was composed, and to whom it revealed, in the Psalms which they were daily and nightly intoning, refutations of all the heresies that had ever racked the Church, and the rudiments of all the sciences that flourished in the world. It is impossible now for this or any future age to do aught but lament over so much wasted ingenuity, when we find the author maintaining that the whole of the one hundred and fifty Psalms were written by King David, and that Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun have only a mystical meaning; that the first seventy represent the Old Testament, and the last eighty the New, because we celebrate the Resurrection of Christ on the eighth day of the week, and so forth. A closer study of the book might perhaps discover in it some genuine additions to the sum of human knowledge; but it is difficult to repress a murmur at the misdirected industry which has preserved to us the whole of this ponderous futility, while it has allowed the History of the Goths to perish.
Commentary on the Epistles.
(2) The 'Complexiones in Epistolas Apostolorum' (first published by Maffei in 1721, from a MS. discovered by him at Verona) have at least the merit of being far shorter than the Commentary on the Psalms. Perhaps the only points of interest in them, even for theological scholars, are that Cassiodorus evidently attributes the Epistle to the Hebrews without hesitation to the Apostle Paul, and that he notices the celebrated passage concerning the Three Heavenly Witnesses (1 John v. 7) in a way which seems to imply that he found that passage in the text of the Vulgate, though on examination his language is seen to be consistent with the theory that these words are a gloss added by the commentator himself.
Historia Tripartita.
(3) In order to supply the want of any full Church History in the Latin tongue, a want which was probably felt not only by his own monks but throughout the Churches of the West, Cassiodorus induced his friend Epiphanius to translate from the Greek the ecclesiastical histories of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, and then himself fused these three narratives into one, the well-known 'Historia Tripartita,' which contains the story of the Church's fortunes from the accession of Constantine to the thirty-second year of the reign of Theodosius II (306-439). The fact that the numerous mistranslations of Epiphanius have passed uncorrected, probably indicates that Cassiodorus' own knowledge of Greek was but slight, and that he depended on his coadjutor entirely for this part of the work. The 'Historia Tripartita' has probably had a larger circulation than any other of its author's works; but Cassiodorus himself thought so little of his share in it, that he does not include it in the list of his writings prefixed to the treatise 'De Orthographiâ.' And, in fact, the inartistic way in which the three narratives are soldered together, rather than recast into one symmetrical and harmonious whole, obliges us to admit that Cassiodorus' work at this book was little more than mechanical, and entitles him to scarcely any other praise than that of industry.
Institutiones Divinarum et Humanarum Lectionum.
(4) Of a different quality, though still partaking somewhat of the nature of a compilation, was his chief educational treatise, the 'Institutiones Divinarum et Humanarum Lectionum[85].' About the year 543, some three or four years after his retirement from public life, while he was slowly ploughing his way through the Commentary on the Psalms, twenty of which he had already interpreted, he seems to have laid it aside for a time in order to devote himself to this work, which aimed more at instruction than at religious edification. In the outset of this book he describes that unsuccessful attempt of his, to which allusion has already been made, for the establishment of a theological school in Rome, and continues that, 'as the rage of war and the turbulence of strife in the Italian realm[86] had prevented the fulfilment of this desire, he felt himself constrained by Divine charity to write for his monks' behoof these libri introductorii, in which, after the manner of a teacher, he would open to them the series of the books of Holy Scripture, and would give them a compendious acquaintance with secular literature.' As the book is not written for the learned, he undertakes to abstain from 'affectata eloquentia,' and he does in the main keep his promise. The simple, straightforward style of the book, which occasionally rises into real and 'unaffected eloquence' where the subject inspires him to make an appeal to the hearts of his readers, presents a striking and favourable contrast to the obscure and turgid phraseology in which the perverted taste of the times caused him generally to shroud his meaning[87].
In the first part of this treatise (commonly called the 'De Institutione Divinarum Litterarum') Cassiodorus briefly describes the contents of the nine Codices[88] which made up the Scripture of the Old and New Testaments, and mentions the names of the chief commentators upon each. After some important cautions as to the preservation of the purity of the sacred text and abstinence from plausible emendations, the author proceeds to enumerate the Christian historians—Eusebius, Orosius, Marcellinus, Prosper, and others[89]; and he then slightly sketches the characters of some of the principal Fathers—Hilary, Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. This part of the work contains an interesting allusion to 'Dionysius Monachus, Scytha natione, sed moribus omnino Romanus,' of whom Cassiodorus speaks as a colleague in his literary enterprises. This is the so-called Dionysius Exiguus, who fixed (erroneously, as it now appears) the era of the birth of Christ, and whose system of chronology founded on this event has been accepted by all the nations of Christendom. At the conclusion of this the first part of the treatise we find some general remarks on the nature of the monastic life, and some pictures of Vivarium and its neighbourhood, to which we are indebted for some of the information contained in the preceding pages. The book ends with a prayer, and contains thirty-three chapters, the same number, remarks Cassiodorus (who is addicted to this kind of moralising on numbers) that was reached by the years of the life of Christ on earth.
The second part of the treatise, commonly called 'De Artibus ac Disciplinis Liberalium Litterarum,' contains so much as the author thought that every monk should be acquainted with concerning the four liberal arts—Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Mathematics—the last of which is divided into the four 'disciplines' of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. As illustrating the relative importance of these sciences (as we call them) as apprehended by Cassiodorus, it is curious to observe that while Geometry and Astronomy occupy only about one page, and Arithmetic and Music two pages each, Logic takes up eighteen pages, Grammar two, and Rhetoric six.