One Marvels At The Man Who,
In Such A Period, Preserved This Mood Of Liberal Leisure.
His style
is perfectly suited to the matter; diffuse, ornate, amusingly
affected; altogether a precious mode of writing, characteristic of
literary decadence.
When the moment demands it, he is pompously
grandiloquent; in dealing with a delicate situation, he becomes
involved and obscure. We perceive in him a born courtier, a proud
noble, a statesman of high purpose and no little sagacity;
therewith, many gracious and attractive qualities, coloured by
weaknesses, such as agreeable pedantry and amiable self-esteem,
which are in part personal, partly the note of his time.
One's picture of the man is, of course, completed from a knowledge
of the latter years of his life, of the works produced during his
monastic retirement. Christianity rarely finds expression in the
Variae, a point sufficiently explained by the Gothic heresy, which
imposed discretion in public utterances; on the other hand, pagan
mythology abounds; we observe the hold it still had upon educated
minds - education, indeed, meaning much the same thing in the sixth
century after Christ as in the early times of the Empire.
Cassiodorus can never have been a fanatical devotee of any creed. Of
his sincere piety there is no doubt; it appears in a vast commentary
on the Psalms, and more clearly in the book he wrote for the
guidance and edification of his brother monks - brothers
(carissimi fratres), for in his humility he declined to become the
Abbot of Vivariense; enough that his worldly dignity, his spiritual
and mental graces, assured to him the influence he desired.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 134 of 152
Words from 35370 to 35637
of 40398
