From Christopher Dawson's The Crisis of Western Education:
The last achievement of classical culture in Italy was the plan of monastic studies which Cassiodorus, the Roman aristocrat and ex-consul, laid down in his monastery at Vivarium in the second half of the sixth century, and the same tradition is represented half a century later by St. Isidore of Seville, whose encyclopedic works had an enormous influence on medieval education.
The standard biography of Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, born c. 490, d. c. 585, is James J. O'Donnell's Cassiodorus, which Prof. O'Donnell has kindly placed online in its entirety. Cassiodorus and Saint Benedict, born c. 480, d. c. 547, were contemporaries.
Church historian Philip Schaff attributes to the example of Cassiodorus and his monastery the typical Benedictine mission of the preservation of knowledge and culture.
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.
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