On Writing for the King

While packing lunches this morning I had a thought hit me that I need to look into further…

The life of Cassiodorus falls into two major sections: The Politician and The Theologian. Cassiodorus begins his political career as quaestor around 507, serves as consul in 514, becomes the magister officiorum in 523, and becomes praetorian prefect in 533. His political career ends somewhere within the period of the Gothic War—when the Roman Empire in the East decides to reassert its western claims and attacks the Gothic kingdom that had been controlling Italy and the West (ostensibly under direction of the East, but not really). Cassiodorus goes to Constantinople sometime around 540 with the remnants of the Gothic court and members of the senatorial class fleeing the violence.

At this point—during his time in Ravenna as the Gothic kingdom is collapsing and in his move to Constantinople—he begins some fairly major literary activity, notably, the collecting and editing of his Variae: books of letters that he wrote while serving the Gothic kings.  As he says in the preface, “All of the letters, therefore, which I have been able to find in various public archives that have been dictated by me as Quaestor, as Magister Officiorum, or as Prefect, are here collected and arranged in twelve books.” The vast majority of these letters were written in the names of the kings. Indeed, the books are arranged according to the people for whom Cassiodorus was writing. Hence, Book 1 is “Containing 46 Letters written by Cassiodorus in the Name of Theodoric.”

Around this time, Cassiodorus makes the decision to leave public life and become an ascetic. He writes his treatise “On the Soul” which he sometimes refers to as the thirteenth book of the Variae. After this, he embarks directly on the writing of his commentary on the Psalms.

What hit me this morning is the relationship between the Variae and the Psalm commentary…

The Variae is a great collection of letters written by Cassiodorus in the names of others.  The dominant perspective on the Psalter that he inherits from Augustine and the rest of the patristic tradition is that David wrote the psalms on behalf of Christ through the dictation of the Holy Spirit. When you look at it from this perspective, there seems to be a strong thematic continuity: both the Variae and the Psalms are collections of brief occasional writings written by one writer on behalf of the sovereign…

I don’t want to push this concept too far—i.e., I don’t think it is a controlling concept in the commentary— or overemphasize the continuity between the two works here, but I am feeling the need to re-read some big sections of both in light of this new thought.