Derek Olsen's Honey of Souls is notable both for its content and for its approach. It is the first book-length study of Cassiodorus's Explanation of the Psalms, a text of monumental importance for the Middle Ages. It is also something rare and refreshing: a specialized study expressly written for non-specialists.
In his commitment to taking a broad, pedagogical approach to Cassiodorus's great work, Olsen imbibes and exudes the spirit of Cassiodorus himself, who wrote his commentary on the Psalms precisely as a textbook that proved to be foundational for the learning of literacy. "This is the book," Olsen argues, "that taught the Middle Ages how to read" (ix).
At present, when Medieval Studies as an interdisciplinary field has become increasingly specialized, Olsen's book provides a model for how a single work might be approached within a broad context from multiple angles: historical, paleographic, codicological, doctrinal, liturgical, literary, and pedagogical. Olsen presumes little prior knowledge on the part of his readers: he takes pains to define terms, to provide digital illustrations, and to select memorable and clear examples; he patiently explains the difference between the Vulgate and the NRSV numbering of the psalms; he points to key works of previous scholarship, while keeping footnotes to a minimum. His style is colloquial. Olsen is also rhetorically skillful at capturing interest. Chapter 1 begins in medias res with the words: "Radegund was furious" (1)! One might imagine Honey of Souls as an attractive textbook for an introductory proseminar in Medieval Studies, open to advanced undergraduates and students earning Masters degrees.
Appealing to a wide audience, Olsen's engaging work may well spark new interest in a text that has received relatively little scholarly attention to date, especially in comparison to the Variae and the Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning. As Olsen notes, P. G. Walsh's three-volume 1990 English translation of the Explanation of the Psalms does not include the marginal notations found in most of the manuscripts of the work--authorial notations that mark the Psalter as a site for learning the trivium and quadrivium. (M. Adriaen includes the notations in his critical edition of the Latin text, CCSL 97 and 98.) Like my own, Olsen's rhetorical analysis of Cassiodorus's discussion of Psalm 6 (239-244) shows how much may be gleaned from attention to these markings, which connect the Psalter to every branch of learning.
Olsen's book arguably breaks little new ground in the field of scholarship on Cassiodorus, but it is definitely suggestive of, and offers an incentive for, further studies. Discussing Psalm 66, for example, Olsen demonstrates that Cassiodorus alludes to the liturgy and carefully situates his commentary within a "liturgical environment" (256). Olsen points to Cassiodorus's frequent use of concluding prayers. He makes interesting observations, too, about Christology in the Explanation of the Psalms. Commenting upon psalm after psalm, Cassiodorus insistently foregrounds the Incarnation (250, 257) and expressly teaches the Chalcedonian doctrine of one Person in two natures. Cassiodorus performs this catechesis, moreover, within a fraught historical context when Arian and Monophysite views contended (often violently) with Catholic orthodoxy: "Cassiodorus consistently locates material that he uses to reinforce orthodox Christology against heretical beliefs" (234). Through careful source study, Olsen characterizes Cassiodorus's relationship to Augustine as one of genuine faithfulness to Augustine's vision of the Psalter--albeit a faithfulness expressed in a radical, pedagogical reframing of Augustine's voluminous Enarrations on the Psalms: "Augustine was the preacher; Cassiodorus was the author" (187).
The Honey of Souls includes ten chapters, the first three of which set the scene for Cassiodorus's composition of Explanation of the Psalms. Chapter 1, "The Psalter, a Bible in Miniature," describes the place of the Psalter in the life of the early Church, emphasizing "the centrality of the psalms, the importance of literacy, and the connections between the psalms and the gospels" (7). This chapter features Jerome's recommendation of psalm-use in his letters to holy women (Laeta, Paula, Eustochium), Athanasius's letter to Marcellinus (one of Cassiodorus's acknowledged sources), and the rise of monasticism, for which psalmody was the "soundtrack" (26). Chapter 2, "Technological Challenges," provides a down-to-earth description of practical difficulties in providing and transmitting written commentary on the Psalter, including "issues inherent in manuscript production, language barriers, and rampant illiteracy" (30). Chapter 3, "Cassiodorus and His Work," sketches the remarkable career of the man from Ravenna and Rome who wrote the Explanation of the Psalms in Constantinople (540-555 CE), dedicating it to an abducted pope.
The next three chapters of Olsen's book begin to examine Cassiodorus's commentary. Chapter 4, "An Initial Glance at the Explanation of the Psalms," invites the reader to take a look at folio 101, recto and verso, of a ninth-century codex from St. Emmeram's Abbey in Regensburg, Germany (now housed in the Bavarian State Library, BSB Clm 14077). Explaining that the codex once belonged to a three-volume set that preserved the complete text of Cassiodorus's commentary, Olsen uses digital images of the leaf in question to discuss the page layout, scoring, rubrication, hierarchy of scripts, abbreviations, and marginal notations. This visualization then lends its support to Olsen's general characterization of Cassiodorus's commentary on the psalms as disciplined, highly structured, interested in classical learning, Christological, verbally attentive, and well attuned to etymologies and other verbal associations ("word-chaining").
Chapter 5, "Cassiodorus and the Interpretive Framework," introduces three sources for Cassiodorus's commentary: Augustine's Enarrations on the Psalms, Hilary of Poitiers' Tractates on the Psalms, and Athanasius's Letter to Marcellinus. Within the "big-picture milieu" (121) of the ancient quarrel between the interpretive schools of Alexandria and Antioch, Olsen suggests that Cassiodorus's commentary is a synthetic effort that combines (Alexandrian) Christological allegory with an Antiochene predilection for literal analysis. Chapter 6, "Editing Augustine and Reading the Scriptures," builds upon chapter 5, describes the relation between Augustine's Enarrations and Cassiodorus's much briefer Explanation, and uses that comparison to highlight Cassiodorus's originality: "He has completely reframed Augustine's work, in some places summarized Augustine's thought, and in others gone in new directions on his own" (187).
Chapters 8 and 9 provide "A Thorough Reading of Psalm 87" and "Short Takes" of "Five Psalms," respectively. Through these close readings, Olsen demonstrates the four-part structure of Cassiodorus's explanation of each psalm (title, division, line-by-line commentary, conclusion) and highlights Cassiodorus's original, thematic groupings of psalms, especially the penitential psalms and the psalms of the Passion. (See 179, 239-244, 244-252).
Finally, in chapter 10, "The Legacy of Cassiodorus," Olsen narrates the dramatic tale of the transfer of copies of Cassiodorus's commentary from Vivarium to Rome and from there to Wearmouth and Jarrow in Northumbria at the time of Bede. Manuscript evidence suggests that "the Explanation of the Psalms spread to the wider world not from southern Italy but from northern England," according to Olsen, who follows the account of Pierre Courcelle (277). Combining the lists of James W. Halporn and Friedrich Stegmüller, Olsen counts "109 sets of Cassiodorus's work from which something survives" (279). In addition, passages from Cassiodorus's Explanation can be found inserted into Bibles and Psalters.
The complex portrait of Cassiodorus that emerges gradually from the ten chapters of Olsen's book is that of a highly cultured, adroit administrator who navigated through and survived tumultuous political, social, and religious upheavals; an educational reformer and philanthropist; and a devout, Augustinian Christian deeply committed to the monastic movement as an anchorage for a renewed society. Pushing back against those like Jean Leclercq who have sharply contrasted the spiritualities of Cassiodorus and Saint Benedict, setting the schoolman against the monk, Olsen argues that "the techniques of reading that [Cassiodorus] taught--grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, allegory, typology, etymology--offered tools for understanding that would be transformed into wings of prayer with which monks would ascend spiritually in their communal chanting of the Daily Office as well as in their private contemplation" (303). Judging by the reception of Cassiodorus's commentary by monks throughout the European Middle Ages, Olsen is surely right.