Sozomen, and Theodoret, translated by a friend of Cassiodorus, and crudely thrown together by himself into one narrative. Finally, such another work was the compilation upon Latin orthography which the good old man made for his monks in his ninety-third year.
This long and useful life does not display the zeal for knowledge for its own sake which marks the labours of Boëthius. It is the Christian utilitarian view of knowledge that Cassiodorus represents, and yet not narrowly, nor with a trace of that intolerance of whatever did not bear directly on salvation, which is to be found in Gregory. From Boëthius's love of philosophy, and from the practical interest of Cassiodorus in education, it is indeed a change to the spiritual anxiousness and fear of hell besetting this great pope.[1]
In appreciating a man's opinions and his mental clarity or murkiness, one should consider his temperament and the temper of his time. Gregory was constrained as well as driven by temperamental yearnings and aversions, aggravated by the humour of the century that produced Benedict of Nursia and was contemplating gloomily the Empire's ruin and decay, now more acutely borne in upon the consciousness of thoughtful people than in the age of Augustine. His temper drew from prevailing moods, and in turn impressed its spiritual incisiveness upon the influences which it absorbed; and his writings, so expressive of his own temperament and all that fed it, were to work mightily upon the minds and moods of men to come.
Born of a distinguished Roman family about the year 540, he was some thirty-five years old when Cassiodorus died. His education was the best that Rome could give. In spite of disclaimer on his part, rhetorical training shows in the antithetic power of his style; for example, in that resounding sentence in the dedicatory letter prefixed to his Moralia, wherein he would seem to be casting grammar to the winds. Although quoted until threadbare, it is so illustrative as to justify citation: "Nam sicut hujus quoque
- ↑ Gregory's works are printed in Migne, Patrologia Latina, 75-79. His epistles are also published in the Monumenta Germaniae historica. On Gregory, his life and times, writings and doctrines, see F. H. Dudden, Gregory the Great. etc., 2 vols. (Longmans, 1905).
