An Introduction to Divine and Human Readings

His Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum (“Institutes of Divine and Secular Literature”) seems to have been designed to preserve knowledge in times that were largely inimical to it. In his encyclopaedia, Cassiodorus drew a clear distinction between the sacred and the profane, but the first Christian…

…of sacred and secular learning, Institutiones divinarum et humanarum lectionum (An Introduction to Divine and Human Readings), was among the shaping influences upon monastic culture. The Roman Boethius, a Neoplatonist philosopher, wrote on arithmetic and music, but his most popular and influential work was De consolatione philosophiae (1882–91; The Consolation…

…friend Cassiodorus, author of the Institutiones—an unoriginal catalog of definitions and subdivisions, which (in spite of their dryness) became a source book and mine of information for the following centuries—who, like Boethius, occupied a position of high influence at the court of Theodoric and was also deeply concerned with the…