Biblical Israel and the Christian gentes. Social metaphors and concepts of community in...

Biblical Israel and the Christian gentes:Social Metaphors and

the Language of Identity in Cassiodorus’s Expositio psalmorum

Gerda Heydemann*

Not that our language is ever quite adequate

to the changing contours of thought; its triumph is brief at best.1

Introduction: Cassiodorus and the Language of Identity

‘And thou, O Lord, shalt laugh at them: thou shalt account all the gentes as nothing’ (Psalm 58. 8).

This biblical invocation of God against the enemies of Old Testament Israel led the former Roman senator Cassiodorus, who wrote his Psalm commen-tary (Expositio psalmorum) around the middle of the sixth century after a long

1 Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, p. 17.

* I would like to express my gratitude to Walter Pohl and all the members of the Wittgenstein team, who have offered invaluable suggestions, ideas, and support through numerous discussions. I owe special thanks to Peter Brown, Richard Corradini, Maya Maskarinec, Hildegund Müller, Richard Payne, Helmut Reimitz, and Philipp von Rummel for their comments on earlier drafts, to Irene van Renswoude and Pavlína Rychterová for advice on rhetoric and metaphors, and to Jamie Kreiner for her help with the English.

Strategies of Identification: Ethnicity and Religion in Early Medieval Europe, ed. by Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) CELAMA 13 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS pp. 143–208 10.1484/M.CELAMA.1.101576

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political career within the Ostrogothic administration of Italy, to ponder the ambiguity of the word gens. The verse, which postulated antagonism between God and the gentes, complicated a Christian reading of Psalm 58. In his effort to reconcile the Old Testament perspective on the struggles between Israel and its enemies and the Christian perspective on the relationship between Christ and the gentes, Cassiodorus subtly manipulated the tensions between the eth-nic and religious meanings of gens:

It is well known that gentes is used in both a good and a bad sense. Here, gentes means those who continue in their wickedness with fierce obstinacy. The Lord accounts as nothing those who do not revere him as the Creator of all the creatures. But if you were to take this as a general statement (uniuersaliter), from where would the Lord’s church be built up? But it is customary for divine scripture to express the part as the whole […]. So you must here understand as omnes gentes those who will be condemned through the act of their infidelity. Some will perish from all nations (gentes), just as the just will be undoubtedly gathered from all nations (nationes).2

Cassiodorus took up the aspect of religious Otherness suggested by the verse in order to differentiate between gentes as the religious Other and their Christian counterparts. All gentes, he argued, in this specific context, could only denote those who persist in bad deeds and show that they do not believe in God. It was important, however, not to conflate these religiously defined gentes with all historical gentes: after all, asked Cassiodorus, if this was to be taken as a state-ment about gentes in general, as the biblical text implied, from where would the Lord’s church be constructed? In order to safeguard the notion of religiously ‘neutral’ (and potentially Christian) gentes, Cassiodorus argued that the verse was an example for the rhetorical figure of pars pro toto. He wanted his read-ers to understand that, though the historical gentes were not equivalent to the eschatological community of the saved, the existence of the latter (as well as of the church on earth) presupposed the existence of the former.

2 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lviii. 9, p. 524: ‘Hic tamen illos dicit qui obstinatione crudeli in sua nequitia perseuerant. Ipsos enim pro nihilo habet Dominus, qui eum creaturarum omnium non uenerantur auctorem. Nam si hoc uniuersaliter dictum intellegas, unde erit Ecclesia Domini construenda? Sed mos est scripturae diuinae dicere pro parte totum […]. Restat ergo ut hic omnes gentes eos intelligas qui perfidia faciente damnandi sunt. Sunt enim ex omnibus gentibus perituri, sicut iustos constat ex omnibus nationibus congregari’. English translation quoted from Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, pp. 56–57. In some cases, I have modified Walsh’s translation or retained the Latin terms, especially where ethnic language is concerned.

Biblical Israel and the Christian gentes 145

A comparison with Augustine of Hippo, on whose Enarrationes in psal-mos Cassiodorus relied heavily as a source for his explanation of Psalm 58, is illuminating. Augustine only briefly commented on this verse, stating that it suggested the ease with which the gentes would be taken over by Christ and converted at the end of time.3 This was a rather straightforward solution, espe-cially compared to the complex reasoning regarding the status of the Jews in Christian times that Augustine developed with the help of this psalm. The con-trast to Cassiodorus’s complicated argument may highlight the degree to which the notion of the gentes and their role in history had become problematic by the time Cassiodorus was writing.

Cassiodorus lived and wrote in a quickly changing political and social land-scape. He witnessed the establishment of a post-imperial order, with barbarian kings ruling former Roman provinces all over the West, even in Italy, the for-mer heartland of the Roman Empire. He saw Justinian’s attempts at reasserting imperial control culminate in the Gothic wars, followed by the swift annihila-tion of Justinian’s success with the establishment of Lombard rule in large areas of Italy. These political changes led, as Michael Maas has put it, to a profound ‘crisis of representation’.4 In a world in which it had become painfully obvi-ous that Romanness and legitimate rule, empire and Christianity no longer coincided, there was an urgent need to rethink and redefine the organization and representation of identity and difference.5 Roman political and ethno-graphic thought had traditionally associated the Roman state, the res publica as the commonwealth of the Roman people, with notions of legitimate rule and lawful governance, liberty and justice. Against this notion of a — grad-ually Christianized — society, the barbarian peoples represented the uncivi-lized, ferocious Other.6 This was also reflected in the conceptual distinction

3 Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos, ed. by Müller, lviii. 1. 17, p. 349: ‘Pro nihilo habebis omnes gentes: nihil ante te erit; quia facillimum erit ut credant in te omnes gentes’. On the function of Psalm 58 for Augustine’s thought on the Jews, see Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, pp. 290–352.

4 Maas, ‘Ethnicity, Orthodoxy and Community’, p. 275.5 See Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, esp. pp. 455–98; Pohl, Die Völkerwanderung. From

a different perspective and with stronger emphasis on discontinuity, Peter Heather has framed these developments in terms of a lapse of ‘central Romanness’: Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, pp. 432–43. For the dynamics between different levels of Romanness and ethnicity, cf. the contribution by Helmut Reimitz in this volume.

6 From the vast bibliography on Romans and barbarians, see Maas, ‘Barbarians’, and Gillet, ‘The Mirror of Jordanes’, both with bibliography. See further Müller, Geschichte der antiken

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between populus and gens/gentes, which Romans could use to convey differ-ences in social and political organization, as well as differential claims to politi-cal authority and legitimacy.7 Christian language use added a further layer to the vocabulary of Roman political theory and ethnography, which became closely entangled with the articulation of religious difference.8 By the sixth cen-tury, distinctions between Romans and barbarians, between populus and gentes, could be used with considerable flexibility to draw a variety of boundaries and to denote ethnic, military, political, or religious groups, only some of which overlapped.9 Thus, the value of ‘Romanness’ as a resource for political and cul-tural legitimacy and its relation to Christianity had to be renegotiated.10 At the

Ethnographie; Dauge, Le Barbare. For a perspective on the changing perceptions of Romans v barbarians/gentes in late Antiquity through literary and material evidence: Von Rummel, Habitus barbarus; Von Rummel, ‘The Fading Power of Images’. On notions of Roman (political) identity, see Giardina, L’Italia romana; Dench, Romulus’ Asylum; cf. n. 9 below.

7 This does not, however, imply a rigid terminological boundary, nor should it be mistaken for a clear-cut distinction between different groups. See Walter Pohl’s introduction in this volume; Geary, The Myth of Nations, pp. 41–62; Gschnitzer, ‘Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse’; cf. the references collected by Meyer, ‘Gens’. For a critique of modern research traditions that associate gens with a specifically ‘Germanic’ group consciousness, see Pohl, ‘Gentilismus’. For a study of the shifting valence of political vocabulary, cf. also Suerbaum, Vom antiken zum frühmittelalterlichen Staatsbegriff; Reydellet, La Royauté dans la littérature latine.

8 For the development of a ‘Christian ethnography’, see Maas, ‘Mores et moenia’; Maas, ‘“Delivered from their Ancient Customs”’. For the entanglement of Roman and Christian perspectives, see also Chauvot, Opinions romaines face aux barbares; Adams, The Populus of Augustine and Jerome; from a philological point of view, see Zientara, ‘Populus — Gens — Natio’; Opelt, ‘Griechische und lateinische Bezeichnungen der Nichtchristen’; Colpe, ‘Ausbildung des Heidenbegriffs’; Löfstedt, Syntactica, ii, 458–70. See also the wide range of material collected in Dove, Studien zur Vorgeschichte, whose point of view is, however, distinctly ‘völkisch’.

9 For the interplay between different criteria of classification see Maas, ‘Ethnicity, Orthodoxy and Community’; for discussion of the meanings of the terminology and concepts of ethnicity in a sixth-century Italian context, see, in addition to the studies already cited above, Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, pp. 13–33, 109–48; Teillet, Des Goths à la nation gothique, pp. 255–334; Kulikowski, ‘Nation vs. Army’; Amory, ‘Ethnographic Rhetoric’, rightly stresses the importance of the religious use of ethnographic language, while drawing a quite firm boundary between religious and ethnic meanings. Cf. Ewig, ‘Volkstum und Volksbewußtsein’; on shifting boundaries of Romanness and civic identities, see Mathisen, ‘Peregrini, barbari and cives Romani’; Greatrex, ‘Roman Identity in the Sixth Century’.

10 Cameron, ‘Old and New Rome’, pp. 15–16; Maas, ‘Roman History and Christian Ideology’; Maas, John Lydus and the Roman Past; Pazdernik, ‘Justinianic Ideology and the Power of the Roman Past’; Rapp, ‘Hellenic Identity’; Goffart, ‘Rome, Constantinople, and the Barbarians’. See Maskarinec, ‘Who Were the Romans?’.


same time, the gradual emergence of a Christian perspective on the relationship between ethnicity, religion, and political organization led to the development of gens into a preeminent concept for political integration. Both Roman tradi-tions and Christian forms of legitimation were central to this transformation of the language of identity, a transformation that accompanied and contributed to the establishment of a political order defined by gentes and their regna in the early medieval West.11

It is perhaps no coincidence that Cassiodorus felt the need to formulate a ‘lexical’ definition of the term gens, and that he did so several times in his Expositio psalmorum. In his commentary on Psalm 2, for example, he defined gens strictly in terms of common descent: ‘Gentes means the nations (nationes) divided across the whole world, who are all distinct and separated, each being united by blood. For the word gens derives from genus’.12 In other instances, the boundaries of the gens appear more permeable, for example in a comment on Psalm 95, where he did not list common descent as a necessary criterion for belonging to a gens. In contrast to the more narrowly defined natio, and in close conjunction with the patria, gens emerges as a concept with consider-able potential for integration mediated by religious affiliation.13 It would be misleading to assume that Cassiodorus sought to establish a ‘fixed meaning’ by his definitions. Rather, they are characterized by a surprising elasticity, and show — much as his actual use of the term — that he was negotiating a bal-ance between ethnic and religious aspects of meaning. At times, Cassiodorus could even speak of the Christians as a gens. The commentary on Psalm 32, for example, describes the Christians as a ‘blessed people’, a beata gens, which is, however, constituted by a diversity of gentes.14

11 Pohl, ‘Regnum und gens’; Geary, The Myth of Nations, pp. 56–62; cf. the papers by Esders, ‘Rechtliche Grundlagen frühmittelalterlicher Staatlichkeit’, and De Jong, ‘The State of the Church’; Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom; Tugène, L’Idee de la nation chez Bède le Vénerable. For the semantic development of the term gens, see Werner, ‘Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse’, pp. 171–214; Goetz, ‘Gens: Terminology and Perception’; Lošek, ‘Ethnische und politische Terminologie bei Jordanes und Einhard’. See the articles in Goetz and others, eds, Regna and Gentes.

12 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, ii. 9, p. 46: ‘Gentes autem significat nationes toto orbe diuisas, quas distinctas ac separatas sanguis amplectitur. Gens enim a genere uocitatur’. (Cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii. pp. 56–57).

13 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, xcv. 7, p. 865; cf. xliv. 10, p. 410, and see below, conclusion.

14 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, xxxii. 12, p. 289; cf. lxxxii. 5, p. 763; cv. 5, pp. 959–60; see below, pp. 179–82.

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These examples suggest the importance of the Bible, and particularly the Old Testament, for conceptualizing ethnicity and religion as factors of social cohe-sion and political integration.15 Recent studies on the uses of ethnic language for Christian self-definition in the Greco-Roman empire have contributed to a differentiated view of the interaction between ethnic and religious language in Christian texts, and of the shifting valence of ethnic language in different cultural and political contexts.16 Early medieval biblical exegesis, however, remains underexplored as a source for such questions. By looking at the inter-play between Roman traditions and Christian discourse in Cassidorus’s com-mentary on the Psalms, this paper seeks to explore what exegetical texts, with their strong reflexive and theoretical dimensions, can tell us about the Bible as a template for early medieval notions of ethnicity and collective identity.

The Expositio psalmorum lends itself particularly well to such a study, if only because Cassiodorus is such an emblematic figure for the transition from Antiquity to the early Middle Ages.17 Throughout his life, he moved between the world of the Roman senatorial aristocracy and the Gothic rulers in Italy, between Italy and Constantinople, and between classical and Christian litera-ture.18 Born around 485 into a senatorial family with a long tradition of service in the imperial administration, he made his career at the Ostrogothic court, acting as a quaestor to Theoderic and succeeding Boethius as a magister offi-ciorum after the latter’s downfall in 523. Under Theoderic’s successors, he was appointed to the praetorian prefecture, the highest public office in the Italian administration, a position he held until the fall of Ravenna during the Gothic

15 See Walter Pohl’s introduction to this volume. Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel; Brett, ed., Ethnicity and the Bible; Smith, Chosen Peoples; Adams, The Populus of Augustine and Jerome; Vessey and others, eds, The Calling of the Nations. For the Carolingian period, see Garrison, ‘The Franks as the New Israel’, and the work of De Jong, ‘Ecclesia and the Early Medieval Polity’.

16 Johnson, Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica; Lieu, Christian Identity; Lieu, ‘The Race of the Godfearers’; Olster, ‘Classical Ethnography and Early Christian Identity’; Buell, Why This New Race?; Buell, ‘Race and Universality’; Stegemann, ‘The Emergence of God’s New People’; Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion; Townsend, ‘Another Race?’.

17 For a critical appraisal of Cassiodorus’s role in modern historiography and the ideological underpinning of the disparate judgements voiced on his achievement, see Vessey, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–13 and 79–101; cf. Giardina, Cassiodoro politico, pp. 15–22.

18 O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, remains the fullest study of Cassiodorus’s life; see pp. 13–32, for biographical information; cf. Van de Vyver, ‘Cassiodore et son œuvre’; Cappuyns, ‘Cassiodore’. See the papers in Leanza, ed., Flavio Aurelio Magno Cassiodoro, and Leanza, ed., Cassiodoro: dalla corte di Ravenna al Vivarium di Squillace.


wars and the surrender of King Witigis to Justinian’s armies. He most probably moved to Constantinople in the entourage of the king.19 Despite his claims to conversion and retreat from public office, Cassiodorus remained thoroughly implicated in political life during his stay in Constantinople in the 540s and early 550s, as has been argued in a number of recent studies.20 After several years in Constantinople, he returned to his family estates in Italy, most prob-ably following the Pragmatic Sanction in 554. He devoted the latter part of his life to the establishment of a monastic community and to the production of an impressive ensemble of texts, designed to draw together classical and Christian learning in order to provide for the formation of Christian intellectuals. His Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning in Two Books is the most notable result of these activities.21

There has been much scholarly debate about how Cassiodorus contributed to the integration of the Goths into the Roman world.22 Famously, he ‘[made] from Gothic origins Roman history’, as he himself described the achievement of his much-discussed Gothic history.23 The Variae, a collection of administra-tive and diplomatic letters published as a record of his political activities, are

19 In the absence of firm evidence for the decade following Cassiodorus’s tenure of the prefecture, this seems the most probable way to fill the biographical gap. Cassiodorus is securely attested in Constantinople by 550: see O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, pp. 105–07.

20 Barnish, ‘Work of Cassiodorus’; Amici, ‘Cassiodoro a Constantinopoli’. See now Bjornlie, Politics and Tradition. I would like to thank the author for sharing parts of the manuscript with me prior to publication. Traditionally, historiography has tended to consider Cassiodorus’s ‘two careers’, the political and the religious, as separate ‘lives’: Vessey, ‘Introduction’, pp. 16–18. O’Donnell’s book is emblematic for this traditional view: even though it is the only recent comprehensive account of Cassiodorus’s life, it strongly emphasizes the contrast between ‘Cassiodorus the statesman’ and ‘Cassiodorus the monk’ (O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, p. 220), presenting a teleological narrative of conversion; cf. the pointed critique by Cameron, ‘Cassiodorus Deflated’.

21 Cassiodorus, Institutiones, ed. by Mynors (English in Cassiodorus, Institutions, trans. by Halporn); on the dating, function and cultural context of the Institutiones, see Troncarelli, Vivarium, esp. pp. 7–38, with the comments by Vessey, ‘Introduction’, pp. 95–97.

22 For the debate on Roman and Gothic identity, see the different views expressed in Wolfram, Die Goten, and Wolfram, Gotische Studien; Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy; Goffart, Barbarian Tides; Heather, The Goths; Heather, ‘Gens and regnum’; Moorhead, Theoderic in Italy; Barnish and Marazzi, eds, The Ostrogoths.

23 Cassiodorus, Variae, ed. by Mommsen, ix. 25, p. 292 (Engl. Cassiodorus, Variae, trans. by Barnish, p. 128). For recent overviews about the debate and bibliography, see Gillet, ‘The Mirror of Jordanes’, pp. 402–06; Wood, ‘Cassiodorus, Jordanes and the History of the Goths’; cf. Pohl, ‘Der Gebrauch der Vergangenheit’.

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highly valued by modern historians as a source for the ideological and admin-istrative functioning of the Italian realm in the sixth century. Throughout the Variae, Cassiodorus consistently and deliberately underlined the ‘Romanness’ of Gothic rule in Italy. While traditional anti-barbarian rhetoric could still safely be used for other gentes in the West, the Goths migrated, as it were, to the Roman side of the divide: the Goths were superior to other gentes, since they combined Roman law, prudence, and eloquence with barbarian virtus (military strength).24 Although they are one of the gentes, the Goths no longer represent the antithesis to the Romans; rather, they can be thought of as similar to the Romans, and therefore as a legitimate political player. They thus transcend the ‘grammar of identity and alterity’ offered by traditional Roman ethnography and political thought. In accordance with the ideology promoted by Theoderic, Cassiodorus portrayed the regnum Italiae as a Roman res publica based on consensus and shared interests between both peoples, Romans and Goths. Throughout the text, he also sought to undermine the conceptual boundary between, on the one hand, a Roman populus, held together by a shared legal and political culture and common interests (utilitas communis), and, on the other hand, the Gothic gens.25 Cassiodorus thus negotiated competing claims to Roman traditions and legitimate authority not least by reconfiguring the language of ethnic and political identity.

24 For two elaborate examples, see Cassiodorus, Variae, ed. by Mommsen, vii. 25, p. 216; iii. 23, p. 91 (Goths possess virtus gentium and prudentia Romanorum). For detailed discussion, see Teillet, Des Goths à la nation gothique, pp. 281–303; Kakridi, Cassiodors Variae, pp. 296–347; Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, pp. 43–78; Reydellet, La Royauté dans la littérature latine, pp. 192–97 and 205–31; Hen, Roman Barbarians, pp. 27–58; Moorhead, ‘Libertas and nomen Romanum’; Moorhead, Theoderic in Italy, pp. 66–89; on Gothic virtus, see Moorhead, ‘Cassiodorus on the Goths’.

25 For example Cassiodorus, Variae, ed. by Mommsen, ii. 16, pp. 55–56; vii. 3, pp. 202–03. Goths and Romans, as ‘utraeque nationes’ or ‘uterque populus’, are united by consensus and common will, caritas and amicitia, adherence to law and civilitas. Cf. viii. 3, pp. 233–34 (‘utilitas communis’), and see Esders, ‘Rechtliche Grundlagen frühmittelalterlicher Staatlichkeit’, pp. 429–30. Cassiodorus’s adaptation of Ciceronian language is as remarkable as the fact that it is emphatically not associated with one particular group rather than the other. As Teillet, Des Goths à la nation gothique, pp. 286–87, has observed, Cassiodorus was reluctant to directly combine gens with either ethnonym: he avoided expressions such as gens Gothorum (Cassiodorus, Variae, ed. by Mommsen, viii. 9, p. 239, has the gens Gothica; the populus Geticus in x. 31, p. 318, is matched by the gens Romulea in viii. 10, p. 241). While a populus Romanus does occur more frequently, it usually refers to the inhabitants of the city of Rome. See Ludwig Traube’s index verborum to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica edition, pp. 543 and 569.


Such claims not only relate to the legitimacy of Ostrogothic government in the past, but also point to the significance of the Variae in mid-sixth-cen-tury debates about the future political order in post-war Italy, as a number of recent studies have emphasized. When mined not only as a source for factual information about Ostrogothic rule in Italy, but studied as a literary whole, the Variae can be read as a bid for future power and control on behalf of the Italian bureaucratic elite that had run the administration before the war, out-lining the theoretical and moral foundations for the exercise of its power.26 Their political significance becomes even clearer when viewed in conjunction with Cassiodorus’s other writings of the period between 536 and 554. Scholars have characterized his literary output of the time — including, apart from the Variae, the De anima, the first book of the Institutiones, the Historia tripartita as well as the Expositio psalmorum — as a series of attempts to provide intellec-tual and religious guidelines for a social elite in the course of reformation and readjustment.27 The Expositio psalmorum, which is usually perceived as a spir-itual text aimed at a monastic audience, has only rarely been considered within the broader context of Cassiodorus’s preoccupations at the time of its composi-tion.28 So far, it has attracted interest mainly in its function as a Christian ‘text-

26 See Bjornlie, Politics and Tradition; Giardina, Cassiodoro politico, pp. 25–46; Giardina, ‘Cassiodoro politico e il progetto delle Variae’. Barnish, ‘Roman Responses’, stresses eastern political discourse (and its religious dimension) as a backdrop for the Variae; Bjornlie, Politics and Tradition, esp. pp. 26–34, goes one step farther in suggesting that Cassiodorus may have published the Variae in Constantinople while in a politically vulnerable position as a carefully orchestrated contribution to debates about the post-war government of Italy. He understands the Variae as Cassiodorus’s ‘model for a community of the bureaucratic elite’ and De anima as his ‘hermeneutic for understanding the moral erudition of that elite’. Cf. already Bjornlie, ‘What Have Elephants to Do with Sixth-Century Politics?’. On the Variae, see also La Rocca, ‘Due adulatori italiani al servizio dei re barbarici’; Kakridi, Cassiodors Variae; MacPherson, Rome in Involution; Krautschick, Cassiodor und die Politik seiner Zeit; O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, pp. 55–102. For a recent reassertion of the argument against a political purpose of the Variae, see Gillett, ‘The Purpose of Cassiodorus’ Variae’.

27 Vessey, ‘Introduction’, pp. 24–27 and 35–37. Troncarelli, Vivarium, pp. 9–38, argues for viewing these texts in the context of shared preoccupations of aristocratic contemporaries, emphasizing their potential appeal to an Italian audience faced with growing imperial hegemony. Cf. also Giardina, Cassiodoro politico, p. 46; Barnish, ‘Roman Responses’, pp. 11–12; Amici, ‘Cassiodoro a Constantinopoli’, pp. 230–31.

28 Despite difficulties in establishing a precise date for the work, scholarly consensus is that while Cassiodorus may have begun writing in the late 530s in Ravenna, the major part of the text was composed during his stay in Constantinople. The preface, the marginal notes, as well as bibliographical information were added during a phase of revision at Vivarium. See,

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book of the liberal arts’, a practical implementation of Cassiodorus’s synthesis of classical education and biblical scholarship, which would later find its the-oretical formulation in the first book of the Institutiones.29 Yet, Cassiodorus’s strong interest in Christological questions, which were so fervently debated during the Three Chapters Controversy, and his frequent polemics not only against Monophysitism but also against Arianism, already suggest that in the Expositio as well, he reacted and responded to the instability of political and religious identities.30 Following this line of argument, this paper explores how Cassiodorus used the Psalms as a source for a social language with which to describe and legitimate a Christian world that included the gentes.

In writing the Expositio, Cassiodorus was faced, much as in the Variae, with the need to engage with a ‘grammar of identity and alterity’ that, again, defined the gentes as the ‘Other’. In close analogy to the contrast between Romans and

for example, O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, pp. 134–36; Halporn, ‘Cassiodorus’ Citations from the Cantica canticorum’; Vessey, ‘Introduction’, pp. 34–36; Van de Vyver, ‘Cassiodore et son œuvre’, pp. 271–75; Stoppacci, ‘Le dediche nelle opere di Cassiodoro’, pp. 21–35. For a wider (or multiple) audience of the Expositio psalmorum, see also Troncarelli, Vivarium, pp. 9–12; Barnish, ‘Work of Cassiodorus’, pp. 178–79; cf. Vessey, ‘Introduction’, p. 36. Schlieben, Cassiodors Psalmenexegese, pp. 4–10, likewise opts for 540–48, but assumes only one recension of the Expositio, associated from the start with a Vivarian (though not exclusively monastic) context. On the successive recensions of the text, see most recently Stoppacci, ‘Stadi redazionali’.

29 Schlieben, Cassiodors Psalmenexegese, remains the only modern comprehensive study of the Expositio. An abridged version was published as Schlieben, Christliche Theologie und Philologie in der Spätantike; cf. Simonetti, ‘L’Expositio psalmorum di Cassiodoro’; Gastaldo, ‘Contenuto e metodo dell’Expositio psalmorum di Cassiodoro’. For the Expositio and the liberal arts, see O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, pp. 157–61; Vessey, ‘Introduction’, pp. 28–35, 41; Weissengruber, ‘L’educazione profana nell’Expositio psalmorum di Cassiodoro’; Halporn, ‘After the Schools’, pp. 48–62; Holtz, ‘Arti liberali ed enciclopedismo’, pp. 213–30. De Simone, Cassiodoro e l’Expositio psalmorum, strongly emphasizes the theological dimensions of the text; for a philological perspective, see Hahner, Cassiodors Psalmenkommentar; on the textual transmission, Halporn, ‘The Manuscripts of Cassiodorus’ Expositio in psalmos’; Stoppacci, ‘Stadi redazionali’.

30 For the Christological positioning in the Expositio and its political implications, see O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, pp. 166–72; Barnish, ‘Work of Cassiodorus’, pp. 158–65; see further De Simone, Cassiodoro e l’Expositio psalmorum, pp. 126–47; Schlieben, Cassiodors Psalmenexegese, pp. 175–84. On the broader context of Christological and trinitarian debates and their political repercussions, see the articles in Chazelle and Cubitt, eds, The Crisis of the Oikoumene; Maas, Exegesis and Empire in the Early Byzantine Mediterranean; Price, ‘The Development of a Chalcedonian Identity’; see also Sotinel, ‘Rom und Italien’, and Sotinel, ‘Das Dilemma des Westens’. On the question of Gothic ‘Arianism’, see recently Brown, ‘The Role of Arianism in Ostrogothic Italy’, pp. 417–26, with the discussion on pp. 427–41.


barbarian gentes, the Latin versions of the Old Testament differentiate between Israel as a populus Dei and the gentes, a distinction that is only partially adequate to the corresponding Hebrew terms ‘am and gōyīm.31 Starting from the New Testament, Christian exegetes developed complex techniques of redefining this Old Testament grammar, in which the gentes, by definition, were excluded from being God’s people. Christian appropriation of the Old Testament presup-posed both reframing the ‘Old Testament gentes’, defined by religious as well as ethnic alterity, to turn them into legitimate partners of the New Covenant, and using Israel as a point of identification.32 In his efforts to deploy biblical Israel (and the gentes) as a template for formulating Christian identities, Cassiodorus could build upon previous exegetical tradition. A systematic comparison with Cassiodorus’s sources is beyond the scope of this article;33 Cassiodorus, how-ever, seems remarkable in his attentiveness to the semantic opposition in the biblical text, as well as in his consistent efforts to resolve it in such a way as to suggest that Israel, the former people of God, and the Christian gentes were comparable. As I will suggest, he was particularly interested in gens as a focus for conceptualizing Christian communities. By turning Israel into a model of identification for a plurality of Christian gentes, he established the notion of a gens that could also be a people of God.34 This was a concern that corresponded

31 Hulst, ‘Volk’; Clements, ‘Gōj’; Lipínski, ‘‘am’; cf. Cody, ‘When is the Chosen People Called a Gôy?’; Speiser, ‘“People” and “Nation” of Israel’; Grosby, ‘Religion and Nationality in Antiquity’. Colpe, ‘Ausbildung des Heidenbegriffs’, pp. 63–73, provides a useful overview of Greek and Latin translations; see Adams, The Populus of Augustine and Jerome, pp. 84–108, for the terminology in Jerome’s translations. While Cassiodorus had access to Jerome’s biblical translations, the psalm text of the Expositio psalmorum is Vetus Latina. See Gibromont, ‘Cassiodore et ses bibles latines’; cf. Bogaert, ‘Le Psautier latin’.

32 Bertram and Schmidt, ‘ethnos, ethnikos’; Meyer and Strathmann, ‘laos’; see further e.g. Gadenz, Called from the Jews and from the Gentiles, esp. pp. 79–82, with rich bibliography; Heckel, ‘Das Bild der Heiden’; Opelt, ‘Griechische und lateinische Bezeichnungen der Nichtchristen’. On ethnic language in early Christian texts, see below, n. 110.

33 Although it is widely acknowledged that the Expositio cannot be viewed simply as an ‘epit-ome’ of Augustine’s Enarrationes in psalmos, Cassiodorus’s strategies and aims in dealing with both the Augustinian legacy and his other patristic models (among them, Hilarius and Jerome), and the place of the Expositio with regard to previous and contemporary exegetical tradition are largely unexplored. See the comments by Schlieben, Cassiodors Psalmenexegese, pp. 15–19 and 237–40, and O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, pp. 137–43; on Cassiodorus’s treatment of his sources, see Halporn, ‘Cassiodorus’ Commentary on Psalms 20 and 21’. For an overview of the commentary tradition on the psalter up to Augustine, see Rondeau, Les Commentaires patristiques.

34 In this context, it is worth noting that Augustine (as well as Jerome) was more interested in using populus as a starting point for his concepts of a Christian community, for example in

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to the need to adapt such conceptual language to the shifting frames of contem-porary discourse.35

The Expositio psalmorum continues the efforts to renegotiate concepts of identity and political order of the Variae, where Cassiodorus used very similar strategies to demonstrate the compatibility between Romanness and Gothic rule. Another link between the Variae and the Expositio can be found in Cassiodorus’s use of the techniques of classical rhetoric. In the Variae, he emphatically located himself within a Ciceronian tradition of rhetoric, that is, within a tradition that emphasized the social relevance of rhetoric as a means to negotiate and safeguard consensus.36 As an exegete, he could draw upon his experience as a political rhetor: his thorough integration of the techniques of classical rhetoric with his exegesis — inspired, as it was, by Augustinian herme-neutics — has long been recognized as the most distinctive and original feature of his work as an exegete.37 Throughout the commentary, he pointed to the

his famous definitions of res publica and populus in De civitate Dei. See Adams, The Populus of Augustine and Jerome, pp. 17–22 and 123–35, cf. pp. 71–84 for Jerome’s usage; on Augustine’s notions of populus and gens, see also Suerbaum, Vom antiken zum frühmittelalterlichen Staatsbegriff, pp. 170–95; Marshall, Studies in the Political and Socio-Religious Terminology of De civitate Dei and cf. below, n. 73. On Augustine’s engagement with the biblical gentes and their Christian reinterpretation, see Borgomeo, L’Église de ce temps, pp. 49–73; Hübner, ‘Gentes’. See Richard Corradini’s contribution in this volume on the biblically grounded redefiniton of concepts of community in Augustine. Cf. the classic study by Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine.

35 For the semantic development with regard to major writers in other barbarian kingdoms, see Goetz, ‘Gens: Terminology and Perception’; Adams, ‘The Political Grammar of Early Hispano-Gothic Historians’; Adams, ‘The Political Grammar of Isidore’; Tugène, L’Idee de la nation chez Bède le Vénerable; Wormald, ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the gens Anglorum’; Kleinschmidt, ‘The Geuissae and Bede’.

36 Giardina, Cassiodoro politico, pp. 31–39, has strongly emphasized the political impact and the social dimensions of rhetoric, which helps negotiate ways of speaking about power and concepts of government in Cassidorus’s work. On Cassiodorus’s reception of Ciceronian rhetoric, see also Vessey, ‘Introduction’, pp. 27–30 and 71–72; on Cicero: Cassiodorus, Institutiones, ed. by Mynors, ii. praef. 4, p. 92; ii. 2. 10, p. 103 (Cicero as ‘lumen eloquentiae’); cf. Cassiodorus, Variae, ed. by Mommsen, xi. praef., p. 327. Barnish, ‘Sacred Texts of the Secular’, has emphasized a ‘homiletic’ quality in the Variae. On and the interaction between exegesis and Ciceronian rhetoric and its relevance for manufacturing consent in Augustine, see Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society; Cavadini, ‘The Sweetness of the Word’ and cf. Richard Corradini, in this volume. More broadly, see Brown, Power and Persuasion; Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire.

37 See Astell, ‘Cassiodorus’ Commentary on the Psalms’; Schlieben, Cassiodors Psalmen exegese, pp. 191–211 and 218–36; Agosto, Impiego e definizione; Courtès, ‘Figures et tropes dans le psau-


use of figures of speech and other rhetorical techniques in the psalter. This was not simply a scholastic exercise aimed at turning the psalter into a textbook of the liberal arts — although it was such an exercise as well. Rather, it was a consciously deployed tool for interpretation and argument, which, one should note, presupposed an audience capable of appreciating the encounter between scriptural and political rhetoric.

Most remarkable in this respect is Cassiodorus’s consistent application of the so-called ‘prosopological’ method of exegesis.38 For each psalm, he iden-tified the speaker(s) and audience as he perceived them, indicating narrative units, main topics and rhetorical settings in a separate section (called diui-sio), which preceded the running commentary of individual verses; at times, he undertook a formal analysis of whole Psalms as orations. It is important to note the implications of this ‘rhetorical approach’ towards the psalter as a ‘col-lection of speeches’: in a very suggestive way, it opened up the possibility of identification for a Christian audience, who could be encouraged to participate in the biblical orations or to assume the role of the audience of the Psalms.39 Moreover, Cassiodorus was especially interested in the resources that the psal-ter offered for formulating and affirming collective identities. For a large num-ber of psalms, he identified a collective — the ecclesia, the Jewish people, or the populus christianus, as either the speaker, addressee, or topic of the texts (and sometimes all of these at once).40 These models of a group uttering prayers or confirming righteous beliefs and attitudes with a single voice (una uox) con-veyed strong notions of unity and consensus.41

tier’; Quacquarelli, ‘Riflessioni di Cassiodoro’; Quacquarelli, Saggi patristici; Curtius, Europäische Literatur, pp. 444–45; Riché, Éducation et culture dans l’Occident barbare, pp. 204–15. On the Augustinian background, see Pollmann, Doctrina christiana; Prestel, Die Rezeption der ciceronis-chen Rhetorik; Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition, pp. 170–82; and cf. the classic study by Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique.

38 See Rondeau, Les Commentaires patristiques, ii, for the development of the prosoplogical method in Christian exegesis and its function for the trinitarian and Christological interpretation of the Psalms. While Cassiodorus builds on earlier traditions (specifically, on Augustine’s notion of the ‘totus Christus/corpus Christi’), his consistent use of the technique, also detached from strictly Christological concerns, seems to be distinctive. Cf. Schlieben, Cassiodors Psalmenexegese, pp. 40–94. For Augustine, see Fiedrowicz, Psalmus vox totius Christi; for the classical tradition, see Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, pp. 407–13.

39 Astell, ‘Cassiodorus’ Commentary on the Psalms’; Schlieben, Cassiodors Psalmenexegese, pp. 205–09; Hahner, Cassiodors Psalmenkommentar, pp. 65–71.

40 Cf. Schlieben, Cassiodors Psalmenexegese, pp. 47 and 72–73.41 For example, Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cxxxii. tit., p. 1206,

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Cassiodorus was aware of the ‘metaphoricity’ of these ‘corporate speak-ers’ but also of the performative force of such a setting. In the commentary to Psalm 4, he argued for the ecclesia as an extraordinarily apt example of mytho-poeia, personified speech. Since she is identical with her members, a multi-tude of concrete human beings, the ecclesia can be justly thought of as having a ‘personality’ — unlike the patria or the ciuitas, for that matter, which are mere ‘fashionings of our hearts’ imaginations’.42 In the preface to the work, Cassiodorus acknowledged the wide-ranging impact of biblical metaphors on human understanding:

[Scripture] compares heavenly things with things on earth, so that we may be cap-able of understanding, through the use of most familiar metaphors (notissimae similitudines) things of an otherwise incomprehensible magnitude. In its words lies a tremendous and admirable power, suddenly explaining to us immeasurable and incomprehensible things in just two or three words.43

cf. Barnish, ‘Work of Cassiodorus’, p. 162; see also cxxiii. tit., p. 1159: ‘Gradus istos et in multis unum et in uno multos ascendere propheta testatur, quando plurali et singulari numero in his psalmis locutus fuisse testatur. Non iniuria, quia et populus Dei unum corpus est Christi et plebs iterum deuota per unumquemque fidelium probatur effusa. Quapropter, siue hoc unus, siue plures loquantur, una tamen decantat Ecclesia’; in a similar vein cxxxvii. 2, p. 1238.

42 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, iv. div., p. 56: ‘Per totum psalmum uerba sunt sanctae matris Ecclesiae, quae non in cordibus nostris phantastica imaginatione formatur, sicut patria uel ciuitas uel aliquid eorum simile, quod personam non habet existentem, sed Ecclesia est collectio fidelium sanctorum omnium, anima et cor unum, sponsa Christi, Ierusalem futuri saeculi […] Quapropter nefas est hic aliquod dubium introducere, ubi tanta ueritas cognoscitur tot testimonia perhibere. Et ideo sub figura mythopoeia, Ecclesiam dicamus loqui, quae personis semper cognoscitur certissimis applicari’. Cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, i, p. 73. The choice of the word mythopoeia is curious: as Schlieben has argued, Cassiodorus’s definition of the term is almost identical to his definition of ethopoeia, which is the regular term for fictive speeches by real persons. Cassiodorus’s aim seems to have been to differentiate the church as a spokesperson from instances of prosopoeia, which he understood as the fictive speeches of personified, non-human speakers. The use of mythopoeia most likely derives from the interpretative traditions of Greek tragedy. See Schlieben, Cassiodors Psalmenexegese, pp. 41–51. For the awareness of metaphoricity, see also Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cxlii. tit. and 3, pp. 1274 and 1276.

43 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, praef. 15, p. 21: ‘Caelestia terrenis comparat, ut quod incomprehensibilis magnitudo uetat intellegi, per notissimas similitudines possit aduerti. In uerbis autem serendis mira potentia est, ut subito immensa nobis atque incomprehensibilia duobus tribusque sermonibus explicetur’. Cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, i, p. 39.


As Cassiodorus saw it, the human world and the divine order were meta-phorically connected through scripture.44 The metaphorical interplay between biblical and human language was brought out in exegetical discourse; in exe-getical texts, we can therefore trace its rich cognitive potential and semantic dynamic. In the following analysis, I will concentrate on the term gens and its place within this metaphorical process, that is, on the notions of belonging and providential significance it could convey through its association with bibli-cal models and Christian communities. Rather than looking for a core mean-ing, I will trace its use by Cassiodorus to describe specific groups ranging from Old Testament Israel to Christian gentes, and its relation to complementary generic terminology such as populus and natio. As a tool for understanding the alignment between the biblical language of identity and the language of social and political integration in the Expositio, I will use the concept of ‘social meta-phors’. After a brief introduction to what I mean by that notion (Section 1), I will discuss Cassiodorus’s approach to Israel as a social metaphor, and his use of gens to describe Israel, not only in its role as a historical actor, but also with regard to its status as a people of God (Section 2). Section 3 will consider the strategies of Christianization of the Old Testament model of a people of God; I will then look at how Cassiodorus framed this Christian version of a peo-ple of God as a plurality of gentes, while at the same time turning the gens of Israel into a concrete model of identification for each of these Christian gentes (Section 4). In conclusion, I will suggest some implications of this use of Israel as a social metaphor for Cassiodorus’s notion of gens as a Christian concept of community.

1. Social Metaphors

The Psalms offer a rich set of social metaphors. Images such as the human body, the flock and its shepherd, the seed of Abraham or, most pervasively, ‘Israel’ itself, are used to explain to a group who they are as a community, or, more pre-cisely, how they are supposed to think of themselves as a community, and how it relates to the wider social and cosmological order.45 A particularly interest-

44 See Richard Corradini’s contribution with reference to Augustine. Cf. Lavere, ‘Metaphor and Symbol in St Augustine’s De civitate Dei’.

45 For ‘social metaphors’ and the Bible, see e.g. Neusner, Judaism and its Social Metaphors; Buell, Making Christians. From a sociological perspective: Lüdemann, Metaphern der Gesellschaft; Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries. On the metaphorical quality of the Psalms,

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ing metaphor is the vine, which appears in various Old Testament books.46 In Psalm 79, it serves as a vehicle for a condensed retelling of the history of Israel from Exodus up to an unspecified military defeat.

Thou hast brought a vineyard out of Egypt; thou hast cast out the gentes, and planted it. Thou hast made a path in its sight, and didst plant its roots, and the land was filled. The shadow of it covered the hills, and the branches thereof the cedars of God. Thou hast stretched forth its branches unto the sea: and its boughs unto the river. Why hast thou dismantled the wall thereof, so that all they who pass by the way strip it? The boar out of the wood has exterminated it, and a singular wild beast has devoured it.47

Like every organic metaphor, the vine has strong implications for the percep-tion of a human collective and its cohesiveness. The biblical text fully exploits the potential of the metaphor: like the vine, Israel is rooted in its territory, the Promised Land; its consolidation and expansion as a political community is framed as organic growth; like the vine with its hedges, it is in need of bounda-ries, the loss of which endangers the community and leads to its destruction. In this story, the existence and fortunes of the vine are dependent upon the actions and benevolence of the farmer, much as Israel is subject to God’s provi-dence, saving power and punishment. The metaphor of the vine, therefore, not only has the effect of ‘naturalizing’ Israel’s existence and historical develop-ment. It also serves to develop a specific interpretation of Israel as God’s people and the dynamic of its relationship with God.

This example also highlights the cognitive and pragmatic functions of meta-phor.48 Language taken from concrete, tangible experience is used to develop a

see Brown, Seeing the Psalms. On the function of the image of the shepherd and his flock in Christian preaching, see the contribution by Marianne Pollheimer in this volume.

46 See, most prominently, Is 5. 1–7; Ier 2. 21; 12. 7–13; Os 10. 1. The metaphor is taken up in Mt 20. 1–8 and Mt 20. 33–41. For the use of agricultural imagery in early Christian texts, see Hodge, ‘Olive Trees and Ethnicities’.

47 Psalm 79. 9–14: ‘Vineam ex Aegypto transtulisti; eiecisti gentes et plantasti eam. | Viam fecisti in conspectu eius et plantasti radices eius et repleta est terra. | Operuit montes umbra eius et arbusta eius cedros Dei | Extendisti palmites eius usque ad mare et usque ad flumen propagines eius. | Utquid deposuisti maceriam eius et vindemiant eam omnes qui transeunt viam? | Exterminavit eam aper de silva et singularis ferus depastus est eam’. Biblical texts and translations are quoted directly from Cassiodorus’s Expositio to ensure correspondence with the text of the commentary.

48 The following analysis takes its theoretical starting point from Hans Blumenberg’s ‘metaphorolog y’, which offers important tools for approaching the social function of metaphorical language with a distinctly historical perspective. See Blumenberg, Paradigms


concept of a community that, to a certain extent, transcends daily experience, and to express the abstract norms and theoretical ideals of that concept. In its specific way of developing the metaphor, the biblical text directs the attention of its readers towards certain features which are shared by both the vine and their community. Between these, it constructs a relation of similarity — simi-larity not so much between the vine and the people as such, but rather similar-ity in the way both are perceived. It develops a shared ‘rule of the reflection’ for both objects,49 persuading readers into accepting the implications for thinking about their community and its position with regard to the divinity that are sug-gested by the metaphor.

In his commentary on Psalm 79, Cassiodorus closely followed the path suggested by the biblical text. In line with exegetical tradition, he identified the vine with Israel, carefully translating the story of the vineyard back into a historical narrative.50 The vine, he explained, denotes the Hebrew people, the gens Hebraeorum, and he proceeded to recount the historical events alluded to in the course of the psalm. The implantation of the vine by the farmer (v. 9) is identified with Israel’s migration and settlement into the Promised Land, accompanied by divine miracles during the Exodus and the expulsion of peo-ples such as the Amorites, Hethites, and Jebusites. Its pillage by trespassers and its subsequent destruction by wild beasts (vv. 13–19) referred to Israel’s conflict with hostile and pagan gentes, subsequently specified as the siege of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans under the emperors Titus and Vespasian, who had ‘scattered the Jewish gens beyond the boundaries of its patria’ and destroyed both gens and ciuitas, devouring them ‘in fearful fashion like hay’.51

In his exegesis, Cassiodorus not only ‘inverted’ the metaphorical process, but also made explicit the rules of the reflection implicitly conveyed through the biblical metaphor. For example, he spelled out for his readers the significance of the hedges surrounding the vine as divine protection of the community, whose

for a Metaphorology. See also Blumenberg, Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben; Blumenberg, Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften. Cf. the notion of ‘conceptual metaphors’ developed by Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. For the semantic dynamic and the organization of (semantic) similarities and differences involved in the metaphorical process, see Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, pp. 87–129; Eco, Die Grenzen der Interpretation, pp. 191–216.

49 This is how Hans Blumenberg, following Kant, explains the pragmatic function of metaphors: Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, p. 4.

50 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxix. 9, p. 743: ‘Venit ad secundam sectionem, in qua per mysticas figurationes, quae fuerunt gesta commemorat’.

51 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxix. 13–14, p. 745; Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 289.

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continuing existence (or military defeat) was therefore contingent upon its reli-gious allegiance.52 Through the specific way in which Cassiodorus appropriated the metaphor of the vine and laid out its implications, he reinforced its func-tion in the psalm. In describing Israel as a populus and a gens, associated with a ciuitas and a patria, it becomes clear that this is a metaphor not just for any kind of community, but specifically for a people of God. Cassiodorus used the vine to shape a concept of Israel as God’s people, with a place in human his-tory and its underlying divine plan, whose identity as a political community is closely tied to religious identity and the moral obligations associated with it.

While, therefore, expanding the biblical metaphor for the chosen commu-nity in such a way as to allow his readers to understand it as a metaphor for a chosen people, Cassiodorus also proposed a second way of reading the text. He constructed an additional metaphorical relationship, this time between the vine and a Christian community: he used the vine as a metaphor for defin-ing and delineating the church, the ecclesia, its historical development and its institutions. Like the vine, the church possessed roots (the prophets and the Old Testament tradition) from which it subsequently spread through the whole world; the disciples could be compared to its branches, the individual Christians to its seedlings.53 Like the vine (and the people of Israel) it could be conceived of as a community that, although consisting of members of differ-ent rank and status, formed a close-knit unity. Some aspects of the metaphor, of course, needed qualification: unlike the vine (and the people of Israel) the ecclesia could not be thought of as confined to a particular geographical region; instead, it encompassed the whole world.54 But like the vine, it was created and provided for by God. Although, through its special bond with Christ, it had detached itself from the sinful state which had caused the destruction of the vine, it was composed of both withering foliage and sweet fruits, of sinners

52 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxix. 13, p. 744: ‘miratur cur fuerit euersa munitio, hoc est, Domino subtracta defensio. Maceria est enim de solis lapidibus con-structa custodia, quae solet uineas defensabiliter circuire’; Cassiodorus associated this verse with a citation of Lam 2. 20 (‘Vide, Domine et considera quia uindemiasti nos. Sacerdos et propheta de sanctuario tuo deferit’). Commenting on the demise of Jerusalem, he stated: ‘Necesse enim fuit hoc uineae contingere, cuius maceria uidebatur esse deposita’ (lxxix. 14, p. 745).

53 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxix. 10 and 12, p. 744.54 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxix. 9, p. 743: ‘Sed haec uinea

quemadmodum per uniuersum mundum dilatata sit, subter edicitur’; lxxix. 12, p. 744: ‘Extendisti enim dicit, quoniam ab Ierosolymis haec uinea per apostolorum praedicationes in cunctas mundi partes extensa est’.


and saints.55 And like the vine (and Israel), the church could be subject to tem-porary affliction, which was supposed to benefit it in the end.56 In the com-mentary, the vine thus functions as a metaphor for two quite different kinds of community: On the one hand, Israel, which is a religious, but clearly also a political and ethnic community, and on the other, a universal Christian church. The ecclesia, the spiritual Israel, is written into the position of the community metaphorically depicted in the psalm, and Cassiodorus thus offered it to his Christian audience as a point of identification.

The Psalms, in varied ways, negotiate Israel’s identity as God’s chosen people and its relationship with God, through the use of metaphors and parables, or by retelling and reinterpreting Old Testament history. In much the same way, exegetical discourse uses biblical Israel to explain to Christians their member-ship in a similar community, and their relation to God. In the preface to the Expositio, Cassiodorus commented upon the potential of identification inher-ent in the Psalms:

Whoever recites the words of a psalm speaks virtually his own words, and one single person sings them as though he had written them himself; and he does not read as if someone else was speaking or being described, but rather speaks as if from his own person. In this way, he utters what is said as if he was enacting and speaking himself, that it seems he is offering sermons to God.57

Throughout the work, Cassiodorus’s Christian readers are urged to think of them selves as similar to the communities described in the narratives of the Psalms or addressed through the texts. They are supposed to participate in psalmodies and orations, and to apply to themselves the moral, historical, and theological lessons developed in the text.58

55 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxix. 16–19, pp. 746–47 and lxxix. 9, p. 743, for the comparison of sinners and saints to folia caduca and the fructus.

56 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxix. 9, p. 743.57 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, praef. 16, p. 22, citing the letter on

the Psalms by Athanasius of Alexandria: ‘Quicumque psalmi uerba recitat, quasi propria uerba decantat et tamquam a semetipso conscripta unus psallit, et non tamquam alio dicente, aut de alio significante, et legit; sed tamquam ipse de semetipso loquens, sic huiusmodi uerba profert et qualia sunt quae dicuntur, talia uelut ipse agens, ex semetipso loquens, Deo uidetur offere sermones’; cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, i, p. 41. Cf. Athanasius, Epistola ad Marcellinum, col. 23. See Rondeau, Les Commentaires patristiques, ii, 218–22; Sieben, ‘Athanasius über den Psalter’; Kolbet, ‘Athanasius, the Psalms, and the Reformation of the Self ’’.

58 For the profound impact of the Psalms on the language for addressing power relations and questions of social cohesion in late ancient societies, see Brown, Poverty and Leadership, pp. 79–97.

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In order to understand the function of Israel as a social metaphor, and of the psalm texts as a resource for a social vocabulary in Cassiodorus’s exegesis, it is useful to concentrate on a set of psalms which narrate and interpret key events of Israel’s history. This allows us to explore the ways in which Cassiodorus con-structed a relation between biblical Israel (and the gentes) and his audience, both on the level of the ‘rhetorical frame’ of the Psalms and on the level of the ‘narrated Israel’ in the story. As in Christian exegesis in general, we find in the Expositio the tension between different ‘Israels’ established through dif-ferent exegetical strategies, aiming at the construction of Israel/the Jews as either a theological category — a transhistorical group situated on a providen-tial plane —, or as a historical model. Both approaches towards biblical Israel could emphasize either continuity or difference, presenting ‘Israel’ or the ‘Jews’ as examples to imitate or to avoid.59 As has been noted, Cassiodorus’s exege-sis is not only characterized by a strong interest in establishing the historical reference of the psalm texts; the distinction between ‘literal’ and ‘spiritual’ interpretation is not always an easy one to draw.60 This distinction, however, seems less important than addressing his interpretative strategies as ‘strategies of Christianization’, that is, different ways of forging links between the biblical text and the exegete’s audience: various modes of figural interpretation estab-lish connections between Old Testament past and New Testament (Christian) narratives, or serve to deduce universal conclusions and moral guidelines from the text. Tracing the fortunes of Israel as a historical model establishes patterns of interpretation and moral judgement.61 In this way, Israel provides the texture

59 On exegetical perceptions and the construction of ‘hermeneutical Jews’ in the early Middle Ages, see Cohen, Living Letters of the Law; Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, and Scheil, The Footsteps of Israel. In general, see Simon, Verus Israel; Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens; Harvey, The True Israel; Lieu, Image and Reality; Olster, Roman Defeat, Christian Response; Neusner and Frerichs, eds, To See Ourselves as Others See Us; Becker and Reed, eds, The Ways that Never Parted.

60 O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, pp. 153–56; Astell, ‘Cassiodorus’ Commentary on the Psalms’, p. 68; Hahner, Cassiodors Psalmenkommentar, pp. 29–35; Schlieben, Cassiodors Psalmenexegese, pp. 107–12 and 220.

61 For the gradual transition, rather than strict distinction, between ‘literal’ and ‘allegorical/figural’ senses see Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. Establishing the historical reference (and its moral implications) can provide the basis for spiritual reading, which moves far afield from modern conceptions of the ‘literal’ or ‘verbal’ meaning of a word. In a similar way, allegory and typology differ according to their ‘mode of reference’, and can often be combined. For classic accounts, cf. Daniélou, Sacramentum futuri; Auerbach, ‘Figura’; De Lubac, Exégèse médievale.


for an ideal chosen community; at the same time, it can be deployed as a con-crete model and thus shape the concept of the Christian community — univer-sal or particular — supposed to take its place.

The relation between biblical Israel and its Christian counterpart estab-lished by figural reading is not one of substitution, but of overlap. For the sake of clarity, however, I will consider the two layers of the metaphorical process separately: I will first explore the ways in which Cassiodorus presented Israel as a model, both in its spiritual dimensions as a ‘theological’ entity and in its func-tion as a historical and political embodiment of a chosen people. In a second step, I will consider in detail the relations of similarity constructed between Israel and Christian communities. Tracing these metaphorical relationships helps elucidate the perceptions of Israel and of the different Christian com-munities integrated into the metaphor, as well as the semantic range of the con-cepts he used to describe these communities through biblical analogy.

2. Israel as a Social Metaphor

The Psalms contain powerful narratives about the people of Israel and their rela-tionship with God through history. How did Cassiodorus adopt and interpret these stories, in order to present Israel as a ‘people of God in action’ that could serve as a model for Christian polities? In looking at the story of the vine, we have already encountered the most important features ascribed to Israel as a his-torical community by Cassiodorus; it is, however, useful to investigate in closer detail the rules of the reflection associated with Israel as a social metaphor.

Psalm 77 provides a convenient starting point. The biblical text presents a condensed retelling of the history of Israel from its origins up to the reign of David. It frames the story of divine election and human response to it in terms of the recurring logic of sin and ingratitude, divine revenge and deliverance, thus turning the psalm into a warning example for future generations. In his commentary, Cassiodorus chose a strongly ‘Paulinic’ approach to the psalm. He included elaborate discussions about the legitimacy of the typological method, and presented some of its classic cases, such as the manna in the desert foreshadowing the Eucharist.62 However, his commentary can also illustrate the

62 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxvii. 23, pp. 717–18. For discussions of typology, see lxxvii. 1–2, pp. 709–10 (with reference to i Cor 10. 1); lxxvii. 5 and 14, pp. 711–12 and 714–15, again referencing Paul. This emphasis on typology is undoubtly due to the role which Psalm 77 plays in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, one of the foundational texts for the Christian appropriation of the typological method. Cf. Daniélou, Sacramentum

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importance he attached to conveying to his audience an understanding of Israel as a historical actor. His introduction to the psalm shows just how much, even from a Christian perspective, the content of the psalm still remained the his-tory of the Hebrew people: ‘This psalm contains the description of events from the beginning of the choice of the Hebrew people (gens) right up to the coming of the Lord saviour [using David as the type of Christ]’.63

Throughout the commentary, Cassiodorus took care to trace for his readers the changing fortunes of Israel. The history as told in Psalm 77 showed, much as the story of the vine, that Israel was subject to God’s will and benefitted from his guidance and care. Cassiodorus, in turn, portrayed Israel as a community whose identity was defined as much by religious and political affiliation as it was by descent. As God’s people, Israel was distinguished first and foremost by its adherence to the Law. ‘When He says: My people (populus), he certainly means those who were obedient to his commands’.64 This also becomes clear from Cassiodorus’s comments on the last of the ten plagues against Egypt, including the death of their first-born. In his explanation, Cassiodorus con-trasted Egyptians and Israelites. By way of spiritual interpretation, he likened the first-born to the essentials of divine law, love of God and of one’s neighbour. Losing sight of these priorities amounted to the loss of caritas and ratio, impor-tant vehicles of social cohesion. Israel, by contrast, received from God the most precious of all divine gifts, the Decalogue.65

Let us clearly reflect that God afflicted the Egyptian populus with ten plagues, and adorned the Hebrew gens with the gift of the Ten Commandments, so that you may realize that vengeance was inflicted and grace bestowed by this mystery of the number ten.66

futuri, pp. 131–43 and 152–76; Fredriksen, ‘Allegory and Reading God’s Book’.63 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxvii. div., p. 709: ‘Sic per hunc

psalmum ab initio electionis gentis hebraicae usque ad aduentum Domini saluatoris facta descriptio est’; English version in Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 251. See also Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxvii. concl., p. 752: ‘Sic psalmi huius adoranda diuersitas et historiam narrat, et longe alia quae spiritaliter sentiantur insinuat’. Note the similarity with Macrobius’s famous expression of the significance of antiquity as a frame of reference: Macrobius, Saturnalia, iii. 14. 2.

64 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxvii. 1, p. 710; cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, pp. 251–52.

65 For a noteworthy parallel in the Variae, where Cassiodorus comments on the importance of the decalogue as the foundation of human legal systems, see Cassiodorus, Variae, ed. by Mommsen, vii. 46, pp. 225–26; cf. Kakridi, Cassiodors Variae, p. 338.

66 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxvii. 51, pp. 725–26: ‘Et percussit omne primogenitum in terra Aegypti: primitias laboris eorum in tabernaculis Cham. Ecce decima


We may observe that it is the gens Hebraeorum which acquires the Ten Com-mandments, while the plagues come upon the populus Aegyptiorum.67 The shared experience of divine miracles during the Exodus further shaped the Israelites’ sense of belonging before entering the Promised Land.68 Once estab-lished as a political entity, Israel was to be considered God’s possession, and its fate lay within his hands, as Cassiodorus made clear when speaking about divine revenge for Israel’s sinful behaviour, which led to the capture of the Ark of the Covenant by the Philistines and the subsequent defeat of the Israelites. Cassiodorus reaffirmed the notion that this was a well-deserved punishment, and he closely linked Israel’s military defeat to the loss of this most conspicuous sign of religious identity, ‘through which they regarded themselves as uncon-querable and outstanding in the highest renown of splendour’.69 It was to be expected, he explained, that ‘the people (populus) fell ignobly into destruc-tion beneath the sword, for the distinction of the Ark was seen to have been removed from them’. Once God had abandoned his chosen people (populus) due to their immeasurable crimes, no assistance was available to those deprived of divine consolation.70 Still, Cassiodorus weighed his words carefully so as to

illa plaga primogenitorum, quam ira Dei per angelos malos minabatur, exponitur. Talis enim tantaque fuit, ut Israeliticum populum, quem nolebant Aegyptii ante dimittere, ultro potius exire compellerent. Primogenita sunt quae primo loco sensibus nostris reuerenter occurrunt, ut est illud mandatum summum, Deum ex toto corde diligere, proximi quoque habendam modis omnibus caritatem. Haec quando pereunt, primogenitorum amissione percutimur, et in ipsa prole rationis orbamur. Respiciamus plane quod populum Aegyptiorum decem plagis afflixerit, Hebraeorum gentem decalogi munere decorauerit; ut hoc sacramento numeri et ultionem datam reperias, et gratiam praestitam fuisse cognoscas’; cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 208.

67 Cf., by contrast, Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos, ed. by Dekkers and Fraipont, ii, lxxvii. 27, p. 1088: ‘quem non moueat quod decem plagis percutiuntur Aegyptii, et decem praeceptis scribuntur tabulae, quibus regatur populus Dei?’.

68 Thus, Cassiodorus comments on the crossing of the Red Sea: ‘God brings [Israel] through [the sea], that is, to the safety of the land which had been promised them; they seemed to advance to it sharing the same fortune (sors communis), without fear of the sea’ (Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxvii. 13, p. 714; Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 256).

69 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxvii. 61, p. 728: ‘Quapropter uirtutem et pulchritudinem significat arcam testamenti, per quam sibi inter gentes uidebantur inuicti et summa decoris laude praecipui’ (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 271).

70 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxvii. 62, p. 728: ‘Consequens fuit ut populus gladio caderet turpiter in ruinam, cui arcae dignitatis probabatur ablata […]. Nec

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draw a balance between Israel’s collective fate — the captivity of the gens — and the moral integrity of just individuals: ‘even if [God] let the people (gens) be led captive, he nevertheless preserved those who were pleasing to him by the integrity of their conscience’.71

From these passages, it becomes clear that although Israel is frequently described as a populus in this commentary, to Cassiodorus, its status as a cho-sen people is not bound up with the terms populus and gens. There are numer-ous passages throughout the Expositio psalmorum where Israel is called a gens precisely in the context of divine election or in narratives about God’s actions on behalf of that gens.72 Gens, as much as populus, is used by Cassiodorus to describe various dimensions of Israel’s identity as a historical model for a peo-ple of God, including political and religious allegiance, as well as ethnic affili-ation.73 Cassiodorus clearly conceived of Israel as a descent group. Thus, com-menting on the settlement into the Promised Land, he wondered about the identity of the chosen people as a historical community. It is chronologically impossible that the individuals who were led out of Egypt by God, were the same who then settled in the Promised Land, as the text of Psalm 77 seemed to

quisquam potest subuenire, cui se probantur solatia diuina subtrahere. Spreuit enim hereditatem suam, quando populum, quem inter multas nationes elegerat, pro scelorum suorum immanitate proiecit. Hereditas quippe a hero dicta est, quoniam eam iure legitimo Dominus noscitur possidere’ (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 270). Cf. i Sam 4.

71 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxvii. 59, p. 727: ‘Nam etsi gentem captiuitati tradidit, tamen sibi placitos conscientiae integritate seruauit; sed eos magis in tribulationibus exercuit, quos aeterno honore coronandos esse decrevit’; Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 270. Cf. lxxiii. 19, p. 682.

72 For example: Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, xliii. 4, p. 393; lxv. tit., p. 571; lxv. 6, pp. 574–75 (the populus Hebraeorum, exercitus Iudaicus, and gens Iudaea as the recipients of the miracles during the Exodus); lxxiii. 13, p. 679; lxxix. 9, p. 743; lxxxv. 9, p. 784; lxxxviii. 41, p. 816 (the gens Iudaeorum loses divine protection); civ. 38, p. 954; cv. 7, p. 961; cxxxi. 10, p. 1201; cxxxv. div., p. 1223; cf. cxlvii. 20, p. 1313 (with Israel as the elected natio v. omnes gentes).

73 Although Israel is called a gens by Augustine as well, populus and gens seem to cover different conceptual ground. See the conclusion by Adams, The Populus of Augustine and Jerome, p. 115: ‘For Augustine, the populus Israel was a historical entity racially and linguistically self-conscious, which had become a special populus after being one gens among many, and which after rejection of its providential mission seemed not to be much of a populus any more’. Cf. Adams, The Populus of Augustine and Jerome, pp. 36–54 and 136–62 and Marshall, Studies in the Political and Socio-Religious Terminology of De civitate Dei, pp. 61–74, for the use of gens; both autors base their conclusions on De civitate Dei. On the specific argumentative contexts which framed Augustine’s approach towards Israel, see Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, pp. 213–352.


imply. Rather, their biological offspring reached the land, where they contin-ued the nomen and gens of the Hebrews:

And he took away his own people (populus) as sheep: and guided them in the wilderness like a flock. And he brought them out in hope, and they feared not: and the sea overwhelmed their enemies. And he brought them to the mountain of sanctification, this mountain which his right hand purchased […]. But a problem can be raised at this point, for he did not lead those same persons He took from the land of Egypt to the mountain of sanctification [i.e., Jerusalem]. But since the discussion is about the populus of the Jews, it is clear that those who succeeded their forbears and are acknowledged to have carried on nomen and gens of the Hebrews, are known to have been led to this city.74

Again, it is important to note that while the term gens is associated with bio-logical descent, it also serves to convey a sense of shared history, destiny, and collective identity. Subsequently, the historical continuity of the Hebrew peo-ple as established by this interpretation could be used as a metaphor for the continuity between the old and the new People of God, just as Israel’s experi-ence of liberation called to mind the Christian experience of salvation worked through Christ.

Elsewhere as well, Cassiodorus took a special interest in the physical con-tinuity of Israel, provided for by God. With regard to the sojourn in Egypt as narrated in Psalm 104, he observed the extraordinary fertility of Israelite women, while he considered the absence of illness during the migration through the desert as a divine gift.75 Commenting on Psalm 105, where Moses interceded with God on behalf of Israel after the adoration of the Golden Calf, Cassiodorus lavishly praised Moses for averting the extinction of the Israelite people, ‘tota illa gens’. As an upright leader, Moses did not fail to punish sinners among the people if need be. But when faced with the threat of God’s abandon-

74 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxvii. 52–54, p. 726: ‘Et abstulit sicut oues populum suum; et perduxit eos tamquam gregem in deserto. Et eduxit eos in spe et non timuerunt; et inimicos eorum operuit mare. Et induxit eos in montem sanctificationis: montem hunc quem acquisiuit dextera eius […]. Hic tamen ostenditur quid illa decima plaga compleuerit: scilicet ut populus Domini ab impia seruitute liberatus, ad terram repromissionis incolumis perueniret. Sed potest hic nonnulla quaestio suboriri, quia non illos quos abstulit de terra Aegypti, eosdem in montem sanctificationis adduxit [i.e., Jerusalem] […]. Sed dum ageretur de populo Iudaeorum, ipsos notum est ad hanc ciuitatem fuisse perductos, qui suis patribus succedentes et nomen et gentem Hebraeorum continuisse noscuntur’. Cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 269.

75 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, civ. 24 and 37, pp. 950 and 954.

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ment of the people as a whole, ‘he prayed that he himself should be destroyed rather than that the entire nation (gens) should perish’.76

While the term gens certainly denotes a concrete, historical community, there is not a dividing line between such a historical community and a peo-ple of God. Psalm 75 is a particularly telling example for the importance that Cassiodorus attached to Israel’s status as a gens for its status as a people of God. Verse 1 reads: ‘Notus in Iudaea Deus; in Israel magnum nomen eius’. To a Christian reader, this is a paradoxical statement given the Jews’ rejection of the messiah. Therefore, the exegete’s task is to undermine this strong claim to the uniqueness of the bond between Israel and God, and to explain why, so to speak, Judaea can no longer be considered Judaea (and Israel no longer be called Israel), being superseded by the Christian church, the true Judaea (uerus Iudaea). Building upon Augustine’s exegesis, Cassiodorus started by laying out the conditions of Israel’s previous status, relating a kind of condensed origo of the Jewish people.

We must investigate what Judaea is, so that the truth of the statement can be clear to us. Though the Jewish people was divided into twelve tribes, it is known that they got their name from Judah, son of Jacob. From his line they appointed kings to rule them by God’s dispensation, so that the royal line passed from its physical origin to the coming of the heavenly Prince.77

The first thing to note is that while the biblical language is territorial, the ensu-ing argument is not. The Jewish people derived their name from Judah, son of Jacob and the genealogical starting point of the tribe of Judah. While this may seem strange given that the people as a whole consisted of twelve tribes,

76 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cv. 23, p. 966: ‘[Moyses] stetit contra Dominum dicens: Si dimittis illis peccatum, dimitte; sin autem, dele me de libro tuo. O sanctum uirum et omne laude dignissimum, quando a monte Sina ad castra descendit et ante simulacrum uidit populum nefanda gesticulatione gaudentem, commotus aduersum eos tabulas fregit et gladio alterutrum iussit interfici; sed ubi uniuersalis calamitas imminebat, se potius precatur exstingui, ne pateretur gentem generaliter interire. Utrumque pium, utrumque gloriosum […]’ (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, iii, p. 75); cf. also Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxvii. 38, p. 722.

77 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxv. 2, p. 692: ‘Sed quid sit Iudaea debemus inquirere, ut nobis possit ueritas sententiae relucere. Quamuis enim a duodecim tribubus Iudaeorum fuerit populus distributus, a Iuda tamen filio Iacob Iudaeos constat esse uocitatos; ex cuius genere reges sibi diuina dispensatione creauerunt, ut uena illa regalis origine carnis perueniret ad Principis caelestis aduentum’ (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 232).


it is for a reason: The tribe of Judah has a special role, divinely sanctioned, as the genus regalis. All earthly kings originate from this tribe and were ordained divina dispensatione. Concordant with this explanation, Cassiodorus disputed the claim of the Jews to constitute ‘Judaea’ by closely tying together their fail-ure to acknowledge Christ with the loss of their status as a regnum and a gens. Through their disloyalty to this true king, the historical Jews lost the right to their own name along with their ethnic identity: ‘a Iudae genere extraneos red-diderunt, unde eis nomen constat impositum’. ‘For when they betrayed the Lord’, Cassiodorus proceeds to explain, ‘they said: “We have no king except Caesar”. How can they be properly called Jews (Iudaei ueraciter dici possunt), who proclaimed that their king was Caesar and not Christ?’. Thus, the Jews no longer deserved to bear their name in both its meanings, as a sign of religious identity (as Cassiodorus explained, Iudaea translated as ‘confessing’), and as a sign of political loyalty to the name-giving stirps regalis. While identity and its loss is clearly a function of religious affiliation, it is formulated in terms of a political decision, as is also shown in the conclusion to the commentary, where Cassiodorus writes: ‘This [i.e., the refusal to believe in Christ] is why you live dispersed in alien kingdoms (regna aliena) and do not conduct your sacrifices, for you preferred to love the Roman sceptre rather than that of your own land (sceptrum patrioticum)’.78

In this condensed reinterpretation of Augustine’s exegesis, Cassiodorus merged religious and political dimensions of regnum and gens.79 With the con-tinued existence of regnum and gens tied to the claim to be a people of God, the concept of gens becomes integral to the functioning of Israel as a social metaphor, and is thereby highly charged with religious, moral, and providential meaning.

78 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxv. concl., p. 697: ‘Et ideo dispersi per aliena regna uiuitis, sacrificia non habetis, qui sceptrum noluistis patrioticum diligere, sed romanum. Nam dum confitentes latino sermone dicantur Iudaei, quemadmodum sic appellari potestis tam grauiter obstinati? Cur ergo ultionem tantam non aduertistis, qui ipsum quoque nomen post omnia perdidistis?’ (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 238).

79 Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos, ed. by Dekkers and Fraipont, lxxv, pp. 1035–52, esp. lxxv. 1–3, pp. 1035–39. The pointed phrasing of the conclusion does not have a parallel in Augustine; Cassiodorus chose not to include the notion that the Jews continued to be Jews ‘carnaliter’; in contrast to Augustine, he did not develop the argument from the tribal structure of the people into a typology between the tribe of Levi and Christian priests, neither did he include Augustine’s comparison between the tribal organization of the Jews and the curiae within civic contexts (though he did make such a comparison elsewhere, see Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cxxi. 4, p. 1152).

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3. Social Metaphors Christianized

In what ways, then, are Christian communities supposed to think of themselves as similar to Israel, which, as a populus and also as a gens, provides an exam-ple for what it means to be a people of God? Psalm 78 will serve to illustrate Cassiodorus’s strategies to translate the biblical messages into a Christian frame of interpretation, and to formulate rules of the reflection applicable to both Israel and Christian communities.

The psalm laments the violent destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of its enemies, which Cassiodorus referred to as the Maccabean wars. It enfolds the scenario of a military conflict with strong religious dimensions. Apart from turning the psalm into historia by establishing the historical reference of the verses, and forging typological links between Israel and the Christian church with its martyrs, we can observe another strategy of Christianization, very dear to Cassiodorus: rhetorical analysis. Cassiodorus interpreted the rhetorical set-ting of the psalm as a judicial speech. Asaph, who appears in the headings of a series of psalms, and was interpreted by Cassiodorus as the figure of the syna-gogue and spokesman of the people of Israel, told the story of the Maccabean wars, in order to defend the gens hebraica in front of the divine judge and to beseech God for mercy and aid.80

Throughout the psalm, Cassiodorus paid close attention to Asaph’s nar-rative strategies. This allowed him not only to establish a second, ‘rhetorical Israel’ as a model for his audience; it also served to develop a Christian perspec-tive on the story told in the Psalms, and to use Asaph’s discernment to spell out for his readers the lessons to be learnt from the fate of the ‘narrated, histori-cal Israel’ of the Psalm text. From the way Asaph built his story, Cassiodorus deduced for his readers the religious significance of the Maccabean wars. Of all the atrocities of war, irreverence towards cult places and religious practices, for which the deeds of King Antiochus and his army provided an example, were the most lamentable. Like Asaph, the Christian faithful were supposed to con-sider such events even more deplorable than their own physical suffering, for they constituted an offence to the divinity (diuina contumelia).81 While Asaph

80 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxviii. div., p. 732.81 Asaph therefore rightly began his speech by lamenting the defilement of the temple:

Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxviii. 1, pp. 733–34; see lxxviii. 10, p. 737: ‘Nam quamuis fideles diuersa flagella patiantur, istud tamen ab eis non potest ferri, quando creaturarum omnium insultatur auctori […]. Et respice quam necessarie inter calamitates suas illud opprobrium commemorat, quod ad diuinam pertinebat contumeliam’.


meticulously described the brutality of the wars, he also put his trust in God. He knew that, even if it may seem otherwise at times, God does not desert his saints, and that the outcome of military struggles between Israel and the hostile gentes is dependent on divine power.82 Asaph’s interpretation was confirmed by the course of events, which Cassiodorus dutifully procured. Divine aid (which comes in the quite tangible form of Mathatias’s campaigns against Antiochus’s armies) is tied to upright faith and observance of the cult even in times of afflic-tion. Safeguarding the religious identity of the community (paterna traditio) was therefore the most pressing task of a leader like Mathatias. By fighting Antiochus’s army, Mathatias liberated his community from domination that was not only hostile but also pagan. Cassiodorus praised Mathatias for refusing to comply with the demand to sacrifice to pagan gods (imperata sacrificia), as well as for killing an apostate from the Jewish religion. Religious and military oppression, and civic and cultic identity were closely linked together.83 Passages such as these may well have been informed by contemporary discussions on the status of Jewish communities, which centred precisely around the problem of solving the tension between the exigencies of Roman law and Christian theo-logy.84 They might also have had a particular resonance in times of war.

The fact that Cassiodorus emphasized the spiritual dimensions of the events even more than the biblical text does not mean that he neglected their secu-lar repercussions. He clearly described Antiochus’s armies as very concrete

82 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxviii. 5, p. 735: ‘Usquequoque, Domine, irasceris in finem; accendetur uelut ignis zelus tuus?’. Asaph begged the highest judge for mercy for the gens Iudaica: ‘Sancti enim uiris quamuis mala paterentur, sciebant se a Domine minime esse deserendos’. This prayer was immediately answered through Mathatias’s engagement on behalf of Israel; lxxviii. 6, p. 736, commenting on the verse Effunde iram tuam in gentes quae te non cognouerunt (Psalm 78. 6): ‘Sciebat enim humanam uictoriam tamdiu posse praeualere, quamdiu diuina potentia permisisset’.

83 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxviii. 5, pp. 735–36: ‘Tempore siquidem ipsius captiuitatis Mathathias unus Hebraeorum zelo paternae traditionis incensus, quia uidebat idolorum culturam ciuicum populum trahi, collegit reliquos fideles atque in exercitum regis Antiochi cum filiis suis tanta indignatione prosiluit, ut se a iugo seruitutis exueret et imperata sacrificia gloriosissime respuisset; intantum ut quemdam Iudaeum idolis immolantem supra ipsas aras amore sanctae deuotionis exstingueret’. Cf. lxxviii. 7, p. 736: ‘Euersionem et solitudinem deplorat pulcherrimae ciuitatis, quando impia dominatione, persuasione gentilium ciuium suorum habitatione nudata est’.

84 For a discussion of the problem of religious coercion and the legal status of Jews in the Italian realm as reflected in the Variae and the Expositio psalmorum, see Pesce, ‘Cassiodoro e gli ebrei’.

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historical enemies.85 Following Asaph’s lament, Cassiodorus explained that the Hebrews were ‘truly held in derision when men saw consigned to captiv-ity those to whose power formerly so many kingdoms had been seen to fall’.86 For the latter half of the psalm, however, Cassiodorus’s comments gravitated towards reframing the story in terms of a conflict between the irreligiosa gen-tilitas and the faithful.87 Just as Asaph’s bid for help on behalf of the Israelites was answered through the emergence of Mathatias, Christians could count on the help of their Saviour, who rushes to the aid of sinners as long as they do not lose hope.88 And like the Israelites who chose to die for their faith, Christian martyrs prayed for the remainder of the community, who should strive to imitate their example.89 Asaph as well, according to Cassiodorus, acted as an intercessor on behalf of the Jewish apostates, putting forward those who had chosen to die rather than to comply with Antiochus’s impia dominatio.90 With considerable effort, Cassiodorus managed to turn the psalm’s fervent calls for divine revenge upon the enemies into a plea for their conversion. In this way, he presented Asaph’s prayer as a model for the attitude Christians were supposed to adapt towards their adversaries, a point that seems to have been of consider-able importance to Cassiodorus.91

Asaph closed his account of the story of Mathatias and the steadfast Israel-ites with a strong affirmation of their identity: ‘But we, thy people and the sheep of thy flock, will confess thee forever’ (Psalm 78. 13). As Cassiodorus

85 See Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxviii. 1–3, 5, and 7, pp. 733–37.

86 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxviii. 4, p. 735: ‘Dicit enim Hebraeos fuisse derisui, qui prius fuerant Domini deuotione reuerendi. Contemptui uero tunc sunt habiti, quando eos captiuitate traditos uidebant, quibus pridem tot regna cessisse cognouerant’ (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 278). Cassiodorus proceeds to explain that the dishonour associated with defeat is aggravated by the reactions of neighbouring peoples.

87 See Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxviii. 10–12, pp. 737–39; lxxviii. 11, p. 738, for the irreligiosa gentilitas.

88 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxviii. 9, p. 737.89 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxviii. 10–11, p. 738.90 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxviii. 7, p. 736.91 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxviii. 10; 12, pp. 735–39;

cf. lxxxviii. concl., p. 820. The same conclusion was drawn with regard to other Psalms dealing with the military struggles of Israel, see e.g. lxxxiii. 3, p. 674, telling of the conversion of the Romans; lxxxiii. 10, p. 678; cxxxvii. 7–8 and concl., pp. 1240–41.


observed and as his readers could deduce from the psalm, Asaph deservedly called the righteous part of Israel united under Mathatias ‘God’s people’ and his ‘flock’, since they were distinguished by their observance of the Law and the firmness of their faith. As such, the historical people of the Maccabean times, whose story had been told in the preceding verses, was comparable to a Christian community, the populus christianus:

But we, thy people (populus) and the sheep of thy flock, will confess thee forever. In my opinion, he is speaking of the remnants gathered together by the enthusiasm of Mathatias, whose merits enabled them to maintain the law of the Lord. They are truly the Lord’s sheep, for they proclaimed His glory and remained steadfast in faith. But this verse can be interpreted also in a general sense, so that the Christian populus too is intermingled with them, for, as we have often said, from the two peoples (populi) a single gathering of the saints is formed. We must note how sweetly he has ended his lamentation, by saying that it is the Lord’s flock for whom he was making such devoted entreaty, so that He would no longer be angry with those whom he remembered as his own.92

Not only the ‘narrated Israel’ of the psalm, but also Asaph, the ‘rhetorical Israel’, was supposed to function as a model for Christians. We may note Cassiodorus’s sensitivity for the use of metaphor and its implications for the relationship between the community and God: Israel is called God’s flock at this point in order to mitigate the anger of the divine judge. Cassiodorus compared the rhe-torical setting of the psalm as a whole — Asaph interceding with God on behalf of his gens — with the situation in the church.93 In the conclusion, he empha-

92 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxviii. 13, p. 739: ‘Nos autem populus tuus et oues gregis tui, confitebimur tibi in saeculum. De illis (sicut arbitror) dicit reliquis qui Mathathiae studio congregati, legem Domini custodire meruerunt. Istae reuera sunt oues Domini, quae eius gloriam confitentes in fidei firmitate manserunt. Potest autem hoc et generaliter accipi, ut ibi mixtus uideatur et populus Christianus: quoniam (sicut saepe dictum est) ex duobus populis congregatio facta est una sanctorum. Intuendum autem est lamentationem suam qua suauitate concluserit, ut Domini dicat esse gregem, pro quo deuotissimus supplicabat, ne diutius irasceretur eis, quos suos esse meminerat’ (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 282).

93 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxviii. div., pp. 732–33: ‘Asaph uero Synagogam significat, quae tamen catholicae conuenire possit Ecclesiae […] Est ergo et iste psalmus totus in lamentatione positus […] qui futura tempora uelut praeterita deplorat et propter duritiam cordis sui genti grauiter affligendae, pietatis studio precatur Christum Dominum subuenire’. Cf. also lxxviii. 6, p. 736: ‘Postquam narrauit hebraicae gentis grauissimas calamitates, nunc petit a iusto iudice ut uastatores eorum afflictiones sustineant, qui nomen eius omnimodis nesciebant’.

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sized that Christians were expected (commonemur) to relate in a similar way to the fortunes of their own community, ‘to rejoice with zealous charity at the blessings of God’s church and feel sore grief at her disasters’. Citing Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (i Cor 12. 26), he exhorted them to follow Asaph’s example and show compassion and sympathy towards their fellow-members, thus defin-ing an ideal Christian community held together by love (caritas) and unity.94

Cassiodorus thus offered his audience a double point of identification: He took care to present the historical Israel of the psalm as an example for the right reaction to military disaster, according to moral standards formulated with the help of Asaph’s discernment. At the same time, he persuaded his audience to adopt as their own Asaph’s perspective on his enemies (that is, to pray for their conversion) as well as his stance towards his own community, and to accept the obligations associated with their membership in it. Solidarity, sympathy and an attitude of caritas were also the central lessons Cassiodorus drew from Israel in distress in other psalms dealing with the various captivities.95 The work of the exegete thus contributed to the salience of the biblical text for his own audience.

The interplay between abstract conclusions drawn from Israel’s example, further developed into Christian ideas of a people of God, on the one hand, and the close attention given to Israel as a ‘people of God in action’, which in turn allowed for concrete points of contact with actual Christian communities on the other is central to Cassiodorus’s use of Israel as a social metaphor. This can be discerned in other psalms as well.

In Psalm 104, obedience to God’s orders as the precondition for divine gifts, and the danger of being misguided by placing too much weight on temporal goods, were the central messages derived from the example of the Israelites and their Egyptian antagonists. From the miracles of Exodus as nar-rated in the psalm, the faithful people (plebs deuota) could deduce, accord-

94 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxviii. concl., pp. 739–40: ‘Considerandum quoque et alta mente condendum est quod caritatis studio commonemur Ecclesiae Dei bonis laetari, et iterum calamitatibus eius uehementer affligi. Legitur enim: Felices qui gaudent in pace tua, et felices omnes qui contristabuntur in omnibus flagellis tuis! Quapropter conuenit ut quod unicuique fidelium prouenerit, ad nostros dolores proximitatis studio transferamus, sicut Apostolus dicit: Si quid patitur unum membrum, compatiuntur omnia membra; siue glorificatur unum membrum, congaudent omnia membra [i Cor 12. 26]. Hinc enim caritas illa praecelsa conquiritur, hinc praedicata unitas inuenitur. Et si causam boni istius altius perscruteris, hinc et illa coelestis affectio gignitur, quae Domini Ecclesiam locupletare monstratur’.

95 See Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cxxxvi. concl., p. 1236; lxxiii. concl., p. 684. Cf. lxix. 3, p. 625; cxxxvii. concl., p. 1241.


ing to Cassiodorus, the lesson that upright service to God will be rewarded in due course: Nobody has served God in vain, ‘nullum Domini inani devotione servisse’.96 But divine benefits require an adequate response. God’s gifts for Israel culminated in the grant of the Promised Land. The land and its riches, however, were bestowed upon the Israelites for a reason beyond providing for their maintenance: As the biblical text suggested, they were meant to facili-tate the establishment of a social order pleasing to God: ‘And he gave them the lands of the nations (gentes), and they possessed the labours of the peo-ples, that they might observe his justifications and seek after his law’ (Psalm 104. 44). Appropriated for a Christian community, Cassiodorus emphasized love of God, love of one’s neighbour and children, reverence for one’s parents, and obedience towards God’s orders as the most important of these norms (ius-tificationes), and he pointed out the importance of religious order, exemplified by the cult laws of Shabbat and Pessach.97

Throughout the commentary on this psalm, Cassiodorus went on at great lengths to elucidate the precise sequence of events and their causes, the ways in which God could be seen to intervene in human affairs, and the reasons he had for doing so. For example, he included a long digression on the story of Joseph in Egypt, to explain how divine providence could turn the evil deeds of his brothers into a profitable outcome.98 Later on, he took great care to define the exact position Joseph gained at the court of Pharaoh after he had won the latter’s favour by interpreting his dreams. Appealing to the account in Genesis, Cassiodorus compared Joseph’s potestas with that of a praefectus in ‘modern times’, who is held to be second in rank after the king. Among his tasks was

96 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, civ. 5, p. 945. See div., p. 943: ‘per patriarcharum exempla [propheta] eorum corda confirmat, ostendens illos a Domino non fuisse derelictos, qui eius imperio seruierunt’.

97 Cassiodorus only briefly hinted at the spiritual observance of the cultic laws of the Old Testament by Christians. Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, civ. 44–45, pp. 955–56: ‘Et ne in praesentibus rebus haererent corda mortalium, intulit spiritalia bona, ut eius debeant et requirere et custodire mandata, ne tantum in illis spem haberent […]. Iustificationes autem eius sunt, ut Deum toto corde diligamus, proximus tamquam nos amemus, patrem ueneremur, filium carum habeamus et ceterae iustitiae, quae in diuerso rerum genere sunt praeceptae. Has admonet custodire, quia earum rerum uidens est et absoluta praeceptio. Lex vero eius fuit die sabbato debere requiesci, in Pascha agnum anniculum immolari, sacerdotes cum ueste mystica ad altare accedere, et caetera quae in hunc modum a Domino praecepta noscuntur. Sed haec et his similia non corporaliter, sed spiritaliter sunt quaerenda’.

98 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, civ. 17, p. 947. The story of Joseph is pursued in great detail in civ. 18–22, pp. 947–49.

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not only to run the royal household (domus domini), to pass judgement and to wield power over all the provinces, but also to act as an instructor to Pharaoh’s sons and the first men (principes) of the realm.99 Joseph’s role as an educator at court therefore elicited a differentiated discussion about the ways in which holy men could act as transmitters of (sacred) knowledge to worldly potentates.100

Cassiodorus, of course, had himself held the position of a praefectus at the Ostrogothic court, and in the Variae, he used Joseph as a model in his formula for the appointment to the praetorian prefecture.101 It is worth noting the close parallels between the commentary and the ‘job description’ in the Variae, where Cassiodorus underlined that the moral responsibilities of the office almost turned it into a sacerdotium. There, he also reminded his readers that Joseph had been a person pleasing to God, thus being able to avert imminent dan-ger from the people, and to ‘bestow on the populus what their ruler could not provide’.102 In the famous letter announcing Cassiodorus’s own promotion to the office, he was not only described as a iudex familiaris, but also as an intimate counsellor (internus procerus), who was asked to instruct the king by recounting the opinions of the wise (sententiae prudentium) through telling stories, so that the king ‘might compare his own deeds with those of antiquity’.103 The reflec-

99 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, civ. 22, p. 949.100 Augustine, by contrast, discussed the discrepancy between Genesis and Psalm 104, con-

cluding tentatively that it was not unreasonable to imagine Joseph being in charge not only of temporal, but also of spiritual matters at court. In any case, the conflicting statement found in the Psalms was justified by the exigencies of typology: Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos, ed. by Dekkers and Fraipont, iii, civ. 14, p. 1544.

101 Cf. Barnish, ‘Roman Responses’, pp. 14–16.102 Cassiodorus, Variae, ed. by Mommsen, vi. 3, pp. 175–77: Joseph ‘mundo prudentissimus

et diuinitati maxime probatur acceptus […] Ioseph uir beatus […] qui […] periclitanti populo prouidentissime subueniret […]ad hoc gloriae culmen euectus, ut per sapientiam conferret populis quod praestare non potuerat potentia dominantis’. For verbal parallels, cf. the expressions ‘uice sacra ubique iudicat’ and the mention of the ‘uox praeconis’ announcing Joseph’s name with the account in Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, civ. 22, p. 949. Compare civ. 23, p. 949, where Joseph administers the retrieval of the Israelites from the famine: ‘On Pharaoh’s orders, Joseph’s cognatio was brought out to the regions of Egypt where Joseph held sway, as the sweet words of Genesis recount’ (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, iii, p. 57); civ. 19–20, pp. 948–49: Joseph excels the ‘sapientes et doctores regni’, liberating the ‘dominus terrarum a cogitationum angustiis’. For Cassiodorus’s theory of regal power that needed to be complemented by magistrates (with a classical education), see Giardina, Cassiodoro politico, pp. 34–43.

103 Cassiodorus, Variae, ed. by Mommsen, ix. 24, p. 290; cf. Cassiodorus, Variae, trans. by Barnish, p. 125.


tions on Joseph as a transmitter of knowledge to Pharaoh and his court in the commentary to Psalm 104 might well have carried political overtones, culmi-nating as they did in the message that appropriation of knowledge presupposes an adequate inner attitude, most importantly, conversion to the right faith:

We must interpret this [that he might instruct his princes as himself ] according to the Pharaoh’s pagan understanding (gentilis intellectus). He thought that the leaders of his people (primarii populi) could attain the wisdom to be able to interpret their own dreams, and also that their knowledge could be advanced to such a pitch of learning that they could speak inerrantly when consulted on doubtful matters. If he had consigned them to the school of faith (discipulatum fidei) — and clearly he would have pleased the Lord by doing this — the administration of the synagogue (Synagogae ordo) would have been established afresh for the Egyptians. But Scripture does not say this, and we must believe that Pharaoh did not at all desire Joseph’s religion, but sought merely the splendour of his prophecy […].104

It is tempting to relate Cassiodorus’s critique of Pharaoh to his own difficulties with his position at the court of a ‘heretical’ ruler. Cassiodorus also commented extensively on the physical impact of the plagues on Egypt, giving special atten-tion to the ‘mechanics of divine wrath’ and their impact on Pharaoh and the first men of the realm in the process.105 The fate of the Egyptians taught the les-son that disobedience to God inevitably leads to destruction: ‘thus we see the gradual ruin of those who consider divine orders as neglectable’.106

In the conclusion to the psalm, Cassiodorus contrasted the heavenly gifts Israel received with the divine wrath that came upon the Egyptians, and he stated: ‘Each of us must now anticipate the repayment of those whose exam-ple we chose to follow’, emphasizing once more the lessons to be drawn from the psalm. Just like Israel in the Promised Land, ‘we must direct ourselves with total concentration of the mind towards the Lord’s justifications, living with His law’. Christians, even if they received temporal goods (temporalia bona) after the model of the Israelites, ‘must nonetheless concentrate on the means by which we can be guided to the kingdom of heaven’.107 In doing so, they could

104 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, civ. 22, p. 949; Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, iii, p. 57.

105 See, for example, Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, civ. 30 and 31, pp. 951–52.

106 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, civ. 36, p. 953: ‘Sic grauiter per partes perit, qui diuinis iussionibus reluctandum esse putauit’. Cf. civ. 28, p. 951.

107 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, civ. concl., p. 957: ‘Passi sunt

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justly refer to themselves the exhortation at the beginning of the psalm, namely to confess the Lord, which Cassiodorus took to mean not merely praise of God, but also ‘performing His commands by deeds’. The exhortation to announce His works to the gentes, Cassiodorus suggested, was continuously being ful-filled by priests in succession of the evangelists and disciples.108

The work of the exegete thus consisted in ‘Christianizing’ Israel as a social metaphor. This entailed a constant negotiation and reformulation of the norms and theoretical ideals relevant to its status as a people of God. Interpretation of Israel’s history and conduct provided concrete examples for living up (or fail-ing to do so) to these standards. Shared rules of the reflection for biblical Israel and a ‘new people of God’ allowed for the perception of similarities between Israel and Christian groups. Depending on exegetical choice and interpreta-tive method, these lines of comparability could point towards communities of varying scope, positioned within a transcendental, theological realm, or as con-crete entities in the saeculum. As we observed with regard to Psalm 78, a uni-versal church was seen to be comparable to both an abstract, rhetorical Israel and the historical gens Hebraeorum. For Psalm 104, the Christian community was framed as a universal populus christianus, or simply by direct identification as ‘we’; in addition, typology was frequently deployed to establish a specific metaphorical relationship between Israel and the Christians.109 Some of the les-sons developed from the history narrated in the Psalms clearly made sense only as an address to a concrete Christian polity and its leaders in this world, with a potentially comparable role in history and faced with similar choices. It is to the specific points of contact allowing for the gentes to be integrated into this vision of a Christian polity that we now turn.

Aegypti dignissimas ultiones; acceperunt Iudaei dona caelestia. Nunc unusquisque nostrum exspectet eorum retributionem, quorum imitatur exemplum. Inspiciendum est autem lumine cordis quod in fine psalmum positum est, ut ad iustificationes Domini et in lege eius tota mentis intentione dirigamur. Nam et si bona temporalia suscepimus, sicut Abraham, Isaac, Iacob ceterique fideles qui abundanti facultate floruerunt, in illam partem esse potius debemus intenti, unde ad caelorum possimus regna perduci’ (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, pp. 64–65).

108 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, civ. 1, p. 943; Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, pp. 50–51.

109 Succinctly summarized in the conclusion: ‘miracula Hebrais collata describunt, per figuram allegoricam, quae aliud dicit, aliud significat, uentura christani populi sacramenta declarant’ (Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, civ. concl., pp. 956–57).


4. Similarity and Signification: The ‘gens’ of Israel, the ‘ecclesia’, and Christian ‘gentes’Mediated via Israel as a model, and, as we will see, the ecclesia, the concept of gens becomes an integral part not only of Israel as a social metaphor, but also a resource for Christian self-definition. In some cases, Israel as a gens is compa-rable to the Christians as a gens.110 Psalm 82 provides an example, the starting point of which is yet again the story of a military struggle, this time between Israel and the gentes in the Promised Land: Edomites, Moabites, Philistines, and others. In the face of these impending conflicts, the psalm text harks back to successful wars fought by Israel in the past, with God by its side, and expresses the hope that history should repeat itself in the current situation. In the commentary, Cassiodorus translated this setting into an eschatological struggle between the community of the saved and the gentes of the Antichrist. This Christian community could equally find confidence in looking back to God’s support for Israel during the wars of the Old Testament: ‘retributiones eis per similitudinem gentium fieri deprecatur, quas israeliticus populus, Domino iuuante, superauit’.111

Like the historical enemies of Israel, the gentes of the Antichrist formed a dreadful coalition against the Christians in the last times. Their very names suf-ficed to discern the depravity of these peoples. Since, as Cassiodorus saw it, the psalm text characterized their mores simply by evoking their names, etymology could easily establish their aptitude as eschatological enemies.112 For the pur-pose of spiritual interpretation, all these different gentes came together to form one army under the leadership of the Antichrist, but this was a turba perditorum, lacking ratio and bound together not by true unity, but by common error.113

110 This usage has its parallels in early Christian uses of ethnic language as part of apologetic strategies within specific political and social contexts. For discussion of ‘ethnic reasoning’ in Christian apologetics, and of the much-debated question of the Christians as tertium genus, see Lieu, ‘The Race of the Godfearers’; Lieu, Christian Identity, pp. 239–68; Buell, Why This New Race?, esp. pp. 94–115; Buell, ‘Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self-Definition’. For the impact of biblical models on the use of ethnos and related terms as a designation for Christians, see Johnson, Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica, pp. 220–33. For the most influential formulation of a more traditional view, see the classic study by Von Harnack, Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums, pp. 259–89.

111 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxxii. 11, p. 764.112 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxxii. 7–9, p. 764: ‘Haec enim

turba perditorum quae sub Antichristo congreganda est, allusione talium nominum euidenter expressa est, ut merito tot malorum uocabula in illa intellegeres plebe congesta’.

113 See Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxxii. 3–5, pp. 762–63. It

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The Christian community, by contrast, was defined in analogy to the his-torical people of God, the Israelite gens threatened with extinction in verse 5 (‘Dixerunt: venite disperdamus eos de gente, et non memoretur nomen Israel amplius’), the nomen Israel corresponding to the nomen Christianum:

They have said: Come, let us destroy them so that they be not a gens: and let the name of Israel be remembered no more. (He recounts the empty words of those madmen which he rightly said earlier were sounded forth rather than spoken). That most savage persecution of the Antichrist is to be carried out with the intention of utterly abolishing the Christian name (nomen christianum) from the earth as though it were some evil; they do not know that when they seek to kill Christ’s servants they will augment the number of saints with their constant persecution. His mention of a gens in the singular indicates the Christian people (populus); for though we are instructed that it is gathered from many gentes, they are rightly called a single gens, for they are known to be sprung from the one origin of baptism. Alternatively, the persecutor could have called them a single gens because he knew that they were joined together in one will; or the phrase can be interpreted by the figure of exallage or exchange, when the singular is used instead of the plural.114

The gens of Israel, Cassiodorus explained, stands for the Christian people (pop-ulus Christianus). Like the multi-ethnic army of the Antichrist, this Christian gens consists of a variety of different gentes.115 But this community, united under one head, Christ, was characterized by unity of will, shared origin (bap-tism) and a common zeal for truth. Later on in the commentary, this Christian people of God was further defined as His possession (haereditas), and associ-

is worth noting that according to Procopius, Totila could doubt the loyality and efficiency of Justinian’s army before the battle of the Busta Gallorum because it was drawn together from various barbarian nations: Procopius, Bella, viii. 30. Cf. Pohl, ‘Justinian and the Barbarian Kingdoms’, p. 453.

114 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxxii. 5, p. 763: ‘De gente autem posuit numero singulari, significat populum christianum; nam quamuis de multis gentibus doceatur esse collectus, merito gens dicitur una, quae de uno fonte baptismatis noscitur esse procreata. Siue ille persecutor unam gentem dicere potuit, quos in unam uoluntatem sociatos esse cognouit. Seu per figuram exallage potest accipi, id est per mutationem, quando pro numero plurali ponitur singularis’ (cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, pp. 308–09).

115 For studia ueritatis uniting the Christian community, see Cassiodorus, Expositio psalm-orum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxxii. 4: ‘In plebem tuam astute cogitauerunt consilium, et cogitauerunt aduersos sanctos tuos. Risoria potius quam dolenda conquestio, contra plebem Domini cogitasse perituros et astuta falsitate, id est dolosa uoluntate nisos esse decipere, quos probantur ueritatis studia communire’.


ated with the citation of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (i Cor 3. 17: ‘For the temple of God is holy, which you are’), thereby evoking the demand to holiness for individual members of the populus christianus.116 As with the gentes of the Antichrist, the name of a people of God was supposed to correspond to its character as a group.117

While Cassiodorus acknowledged that his readers might find it difficult to conceive of the Christians as a gens, and therefore offered a stylistic reason for the wording of the psalm, he nevertheless insisted on the appropriateness of the term gens. In Psalm 77 and 75, discussed above, we saw with regard to Israel that gens described the specific mode of cohesion of the group. In this passage, in complementary fashion, the notion of a gens functions as a tool to explain to Christians how they belonged to a larger collective. Its effect is to ‘natural-ize’ the community (which is affirmed by the use of procreative language to describe the shared experience of baptism). Gens as understood by Cassiodorus offers a means to convey a sense of a shared past, of boundedness and consen-sus, to a universal Christian community. The somewhat paradoxical use of ethnic language (the gens gathered from different gentes) serves to assert conti-nuity and congruity between the Christians and the Old Testament people of God: it eases the transposition of Israel as a model of the chosen people onto a Christian world characterized by ethnic plurality. To Jerome, writing within a very different context, such an identification between a gens and a populus Dei would have seemed much less self-evident. In his commentary on the same passage, he accepted the fact that Israel ceased to exist as a gens, as the biblical text implied, stating that ‘it will not be a gens, because it is God’s people’.118 To Augustine, God’s people in Christian times was indeed equivalent to the gentes, but only in the plural.119

116 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxxii. 13, p. 765.117 Cf. Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxxii. concl., p. 767, with

regard to the Jews: the purpose of the Psalms spoken by Asaph is to achieve ‘that the adamantine hearts of the Jews might be beaten and softened by frequent utterings of the synagogue (Asaph), and that they might make progress at any rate towards that title (nomen) to which they were seen to be devoted’ (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 312). For the dignity of the nomen Christianum, which requires faith and love for Christ from its bearers, see Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, civ. 15, pp. 946–47.

118 Jerome, Tractatus in psalmos, ed. by Morin, lxxxii. 5, p. 91: ‘Non sit gens, quia populus Dei est’.119 Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos, ed. by Dekkers and Fraipont, ii, lxxxii. 5, p. 1142:

‘Singularem numerum posuit pro plurali; sicut dicitur: Cuius est hoc pecus, etiamsi de grege interrogetur, et intelleguntur pecora; denique alii codices de gentibus habent, ubi magis

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Cassiodorus affirmed the notion that the Christian community at large could be described, like Israel, as a gens in other instances as well.120 Even so, it is much more common for him to use Israel as a gens to conceptualize a Christian community consisting of a plurality of gentes. In his commentary on Psalm 67, Cassiodorus turned the story of the conquest of the Promised Land into the story of the forging of the ecclesia, which replaced the Israelite gens, from which it originated.121 The church took over the status as God’s pos-session (haereditas) from the Hebrew people (populus hebraeorum), who had been guided by God through the desert, and received nourishment, faith, and law, and the Promised Land. Cassiodorus compared the organization of Israel into different tribes to the structure of the apostolic church.122 Other imagery used in the psalm to delineate Israel’s social cohesion was likewise deflected to the Christian community. Through the image of the community as a house, Cassiodorus emphasized the church’s unanimity of doctrine and teachings as well as the bond of caritas and mutual consent which linked its members.123 This message was further corroborated by the interpretation of Psalm 67. 18: ‘The chariot of God is a manifold mass of ten thousand, thousands of them that rejoice: the Lord is among them in Sina, in the holy place’. Within the church, the multitude of the saved is united in caritas and unanimitas, being stirred by the law and God’s will. Just like the Israelites had received the tablets of the

interpretes intellectum quam uerbum secuti sunt’. For a view from North Africa contemporary with Cassiodorus, with again very different emphasis, see Verecundus of Junca, Commentarii super cantica ecclesiastica, ed. by Demeulenaere, Cant. Deut., c. 22, p. 40: ‘Non gentem posuit christianos, qui non sicut ceterae gentium nationes uno in loco habitant congregati, sicut gens uidelicet Iudaeorum (ibi sexcenta milia fuerunt adunata) uel sicut quaelibet, Gothica uel Parthica seu Herula. Sed nos dispersi per totum diffusae latitudinis orbem, pauci sumus in diuersis locis distributi, in medio scismatum, haeresum, iudaeorum, infidelium commorantes, et merito non gens appellamur’.

120 See Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, xxxii. 12, p. 289; cv. 5, pp. 959–60; cxviii. div., p. 1059, citing i Pt 2. 9.

121 Cf. Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxvii. div., p. 585: ‘Secundo ingressu uirtutes significat quas contulit populo Iudaeorum: ac deinde dicit quemadmodum ex his perfecit Ecclesiam’; lxvii. 10 and 27, pp. 589–90 and 598.

122 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxvii. 28, pp. 598–99.123 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxvii. 7, p. 588: ‘[…] declaratur

quis sit Deus, id est, qui habitare facit unanimes in domo; sicut legitur in Actibus apostolorum: Multitudinis autem credentium erat cor et anima una. Siue quia prophetae et euangelistae in domo Domini unum sentientes, uerbum ueritatis consentanea praedicatione locuti sunt […]. In domo enim illius ipsi habitant qui se mutua caritate consociant’.


Law on Mount Sinai, God makes his presence felt in the church through his commands.124 Remarkably, these were precisely the features that Israel had lost, according to Cassiodorus, when it lost its status as a gens, as could be discerned from the beginning of the psalm. Here, Cassiodorus turned on its head a text that invoked God to destroy Israel’s enemies, in order to describe Israel’s exclu-sion from the covenant with God:

Let God arise, and let the enemies be shattered […]. The vengeance exacted from them is expressed by the one word [shattered]. For that people (populus) was not gathered into a single gens, but was scattered over the whole world after their caritas was lost (effusa).125

Due to their unbelief in Christ, the Israelites were no longer characterized by caritas, but by hatred of God. In this interpretation, lack of caritas, the vehicle of social cohesion and sign of a God-pleasing community, was directly linked to the loss of Israel’s status as a gens, that is its loss of political and territorial integrity. In return, Cassiodorus put considerable effort into integrating the gentes into the church which took over the place vacated by the Israelite gens, and which transmitted some of the characteristics of a God-pleasing commu-nity to the gentes. God setting forth with the people of Israel during the Exodus became an image of his care for the gentes, who were likened to the desert that God had visited by explaining that they used to be deprived of God’s word and the prophets, a state which, Cassiodorus implied, they had overcome.126 The beasts who inhabited the Promised Land equally served to denote the gen-tes. By joining the ecclesia, these were turned into a part of God’s possession, and received true religion (cultus uerae religionis) as well as enlightenment and ratio.127 Cassiodorus emphasized this replacement by repeatedly describing

124 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxvii. 18, pp. 539–40.125 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxvii. 1, p. 585: ‘Exsurgat Deus, et

dissipentur inimici eius; et fugiant a facie eius qui oderunt eum. Confidenter propheta uidetur optare quod nouit esse uenturum. Petit enim resurrectionem Christi, in qua dissiparentur aduersi, scilicet Iudaei, qui resurrectionis eius uidendo potentiam, sceleris sui facinora formidabant. Vltio quippe eorum uno uerbo [i.e., dissipentur] descripta est. Non enim in unam gentem populus ipse collectus est, sed per orbem terrarum effusa caritate dispersus est’. I believe that caritas makes much more sense here than reading raritas as suggested in Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 122, with n. 3, who translates ‘scattered in small numbers over the whole world’.

126 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxvii. 8, p. 589.127 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxvii. 11, p. 590: ‘Animalia fuerunt

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Israel as a gens when delineating its special status in Old Testament times; he thus deliberately conjured the contrast to the other gentes to then present it as irrelevant.128 Once the church had replaced Israel, the people of God no longer consisted of one gens, but of many gentes resembling, in many respects, Old Testament Israel.

Psalm 65 is a particularly vivid example for this. The psalm exhorts the peo-ples of the world to praise God. It narrates God’s deeds on behalf of Israel, his chosen people, and asserts his power over all the other peoples as well. Cassiodorus interpreted the text as a speech addressed by a personified ecclesia to the gentes. She urges them to heed her call and replace Israel as God’s cho-sen people.129 Again, Cassiodorus included a polemic against Israel’s exclusive claim to being God’s people;130 again, he calls Israel, the former populus Dei, a gens and even an exercitus at various points in the commentary.131 The gentes are exhorted to contemplate Israel’s past as a prefiguration of their own salva-tion: ‘[The ecclesia] invites the gentes […] to strive to behold the miracles of the Old Testament with devoted minds, so that they may recognize in themselves the most true fulfilment of what happened in figure to the Hebrew populus’.132

gentes uera religione uacuatae; sed cum ad Dominum uenerunt, factae sunt eius, quae iam nihil indigeant, sed rationabili ac pleno lumine compleantur. Haec habitabunt in Ecclesia, cum uerae religionis cultum, ipso miserante, perceperint’. Cf. lxvii. 10, p. 590 and 27, p. 598. The difficulties with integrating the gentes in this way by (sometimes unusual) allegorical interpretations might be deduced from the conspicously recurring discussion of the legitimacy of this method in the explanation on Psalm 67.

128 Most succinctly in Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxvii. 10, pp. 589–90.129 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxv. tit., p. 571: ‘Canticum istud

generale […] per quod Ecclesia gentes admonet, quas per gratiam Domini praesciebat credituras, ut communiter gaudeant, quae erant in suo capite reparandae […] prophetiae spiritu canticum istud sancta profudit Ecclesia: asserens spem illam resurrectionis non solum fideles ex Iudaeis, sed uniuersitatem de cunctis gentibus habituram’.

130 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxv. tit., p. 571: ‘Sed quoniam gens Iudaea se tantum ad beatae uitae praemia putabat esse uenturam, quia inter caeteras nationes, quae adhuc idolis deditae seruiebant, sola legem ueri Domini habere uidebatur […]’. Cf. lxv. div., p. 571.

131 See, for example, Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxv. 6, pp. 574–75, where the populus hebraeum is synonymous with the gens Iudaea; Israel can even be called exercitus iudaicum, which was led into the promised land.

132 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxv. 5, p. 574: ‘ordine secundo gentes inuitat ut miracula ueteris testamenti deuotis possint mentibus intueri, quatenus quod Hebraeo populo in figura contigit, in se cognoscant uerissime fuisse completum’ (cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 109).


Israel’s history functions to explain to the gentes their own status as God’s peo-ple and the special relationship with God which this status implied. God sin-gles out Israel as the object of special deeds, as exemplified by the events of Exodus, so as to differentiate it from the rest of the world; through typology, the Christian people of God may learn about their own salvation.133 The gentes should realize that the promise that God once bestowed upon Israel is now given to them; this implied, for example, confidence in divine protection both in this world and the world to come, eliminating fear of temporary tribulation. In his commentary, Cassiodorus replicated the psalm’s rhetorical movement and imagined its effectiveness: while the gentes first appear as ‘gentes adhuc rudes’ (‘yet uncivilized’), alienated from God like their Old Testament coun-terparts but addressees of the church’s persuasion, by the end of the commen-tary they become participants in the church’s prayer. With the relationship between gentes and the people of God redefined, the gentes can be identified with a Christian ‘we’.134 It may be significant given Cassiodorus’s past famili-arity with a non-Nicene regime, that he also used Psalm 65 for a particularly vivid polemic against ‘Arians’, who took the opposite position together with the Jews.135

Elsewhere, Cassiodorus not only forged typological links between Israel and the gentes, but appropriated Israel’s past as the past of the gentes through his exegesis. He chose to read Psalm 106, the last in a row of psalms specifi-

133 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxv. 5–6, p. 574.134 This is most explicit in the conclusion to the commentary, which sums up the purpose of

the church’s speech to the gentes. Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxv. concl., p. 580: ‘[…] Primum salutariter gentes allocuta est sancta mater Ecclesia, ut generaliter in Domini laudibus occupentur, quatenus supernum desiderium mundi nobis tollat affectum. Deinde inu-itat eas, ut discant miracula ueteris testamenti ad praefigurationem illis potius uisa fuisse con-cedi; quatenus ad spem maximam sequens populus concitetur, quando quae ueteri populo sunt praestita, futurae regenerationis beneficia nuntiabant. Docuit nos etiam quoniam de diuersis cladibus quas hic populus sustinet christianus, Domini miseratione liberetur et ad illam felicem patriam, ipso largiente, perueniat. Promissio singularis, sponsio desiderabilis, et hic, ipso prote-gente, custodiri, et ibi, eodem largiente, in aeterno praemio collocari. Hoc si fixo animo semper intendimus, numquam mundi istius pericula formidamus; sed cum laetitia cantabimus, quod in huius psalmi fine conscriptum est: Benedictus Dominus, qui non amouit deprecationem meam et misericordiam suam a me’. Cf. lxv. 8, pp. 575–76: ‘Benedicite, gentes, Deum nostrum, et audite uocem laudis eius. [Ecclesia] uenit ad tertium membrum, in quo gentes monet ut Deum uerum consona praedicatione glorificent’. For the ‘gentes adhuc rudes’, see Cassiodorus, Expositio psal-morum, ed. by Adriaen, lxv. 5 and 7, pp. 574 and 575: ‘adhuc caeca gentilitas’.

135 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxv. 3–4, pp. 573–74.

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cally devoted to Israel’s history,136 as the story of the ‘populus christianus who wandered through the tracts of the entire world in lonely and vagrant paths of superstitions’.137 More specifically, he regarded the ‘redeemed’ who were addressed at the beginning of the psalm and whose history was subsequently being told, as corresponding to populi gentium throughout the whole world.138 Consequently, he interpreted the first section of the psalm, which alludes to Exodus, as a description of the pre-Christian past of the diuersae gentes, who were numerous in terms of population, but lacked teachers and an ecclesia.139 The cyclical structure of the psalm, which formulated the recurring pattern of tribulation caused by sin and ensuing redemption, allowed Cassiodorus to describe the non-Christian gentes and their gradual integration into the Christian orbit. The poetic and sometimes allusive language of the biblical text facilitated the interpretative shift from a moralizing account of Israel’s fortunes to a description of the previous mode of life of the gentes — termed uita gen-tium by Cassiodorus.140 These gentes were characterized by blindness and idola-try, vices and adherence to the riches of the world, lack of faith, true wisdom and the word of God. While they formerly had ignored living by God’s law, thus incurring his anger due to their arrogance (superbia), the converted gentes received instruction in the faith from prophets and disciples.141 In contrast to

136 See Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cvi. tit., p. 972, on the speakers and addressees of Psalms 104–06; cf. civ. concl., pp. 957–58 and lxxvii. concl., p. 732.

137 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cvi. div., p. 973: ‘Post hebraici populi confessionem, de quibus praecedentes psalmi locuti sunt, propheta uenit ad populum christianum, qui per spatia totius orbis superstitionum solitudine atque errore uagabatur’ (cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, iii, p. 82).

138 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cvi. 2, p. 974: ‘Dicant nunc qui redempti sunt a Domino, quos redemit de manu inimici […]. Significat autem specialiter populos gentium, qui Domini sanguine redempti et de potestate diaboli ipsius miseratione sublati sunt’. He then emphasizes that they were gathered not only from a small number of provinces (paucae prouintiae) but from all regions of the world, leaving the reader to wonder about the overlap between an empire and the church (cvi. 3, p. 974).

139 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cvi. 4–5, pp. 974–75: ‘Errauerunt in solitudine in siccitate, uiam ciuitatis habitationis non inuenerunt. Esurientes et sitientes, anima eorum in ipsis defecit. Quamuis diuersae gentes gauderent numerositate populorum, tamen in solitudine uersabantur, cum nullos uerissimos doctores, nullam Ecclesiam habere probarentur, quia superstitiosa gentilitas uiam ciuitatis Domini, ubi habitare debuisset, necdum cum idolis sacrificaret, inuenerat […]’.

140 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cvi. 10, p. 976: ‘Gentium quae ante aduentum Domini fuerunt, in hoc uersu uita describitur […]’.

141 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cvi. 33, pp. 982–83.


both pagan gentes and Jews, they were defined by baptism, understanding of the scriptures, purity of deeds and body, humility, and adherence to God’s law and the right faith.142 The ecclesia, in turn, provides the framework for a Christian community united by religious belief.143

The decision to translate Psalm 106 into a vision of a universal church and its relation to the gentes was by no means an inevitable one. Augustine interpreted the psalm as a metaphor for the spiritual progress of individual Christians. The fourfold repetition of the refrain marked the passage through four consecu-tive stages of temptation.144 Cassiodorus, by contrast, took this to represent the ecclesia catholica gathered from the four parts of the world.145 The deliberate choice of a collective perspective for his reading of the psalm is strongly sug-gestive of Cassiodorus’s theoretical interests: his focus is on the collective and historical dimensions of the Christian experience.146

In all of these examples, it is crucial that Cassiodorus attributed a vital role to the ecclesia as a framework for the integration of the gentes. The church pos-

142 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cvi. 8 and 35–38, pp. 975–76 and 983–84, for the definition of the Christian gentes.

143 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cvi. 31, p. 982: The Ecclesia is assembled as ‘una Ecclesia, unus populus, una religio’; cvi. 7, p. 975: gentes acquire truth and the ‘way of the most holy religion’ once they are received into the fold of the church. For preaching and doctrine through doctores and sacerdotes, see e.g. cvi. 22 and 36, pp. 979 and 983.

144 This reading was based on a fervent argument against referring the psalm to the historical Israel, on the grounds of a fundamental difference between Jewish and Christian experiences of salvation: according to Augustine, the whole people of Israel, tota illa gens, was lead out of Egypt at a specific point in history, as a collective. Christians, by contrast, are redeemed individually, at various points in time; the populus (or civitas) transcends time and space, and consists of people who share this individual experience. See Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos, ed. by Dekkers and Fraipont, iii, cvi. 3, pp. 1571–72: ‘Totus enim populus, tota illa gens ex semine Abrahae secundum carnem, tota multitudo domus israel semel educta est ex Aegypto, semel per rubrum mare ducta, semel ad terram promissionis perducta; simul enim omnes erant in quibus haec contingebant: haec autem omnia in figura contingebant in illis; scripta sunt autem ad correptionem nostram, in quos finis saeculum obuenit. Nos uero non simul omnes, sed paulatim singillatimque credentes congregamur in unam quamdam ciuitatem, et in unum populum Dei; sed in unoquoque nostrum etiam singulo contingunt haec quae scripta sunt, contingunt in populo. Etenim populus de singulis, non singuli de populo; numquid enim unus homo ex populis? Sed populus ex singulis hominibus constat’.

145 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cvi. 8, p. 976.146 Of course, this perspective is not absent in Augustine, either. In rather typical fashion,

he included a short summary of the history of the early church as a collective frame of reference: Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos, ed. by Dekkers and Fraipont, iii, cvi. 8, p. 1574.

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sessed authority opposite the gentes, she taught them ‘to say in a single phrase and to encapsulate in short compass the great motivation of religion’.147 The reception of the gentes into the fold of the Christian community effaced their characteristic religious and cultural alterity.148 Cassiodorus made it very clear on numerous occasions that the church functioned as the guardian of ortho-doxy, and that she wanted the gentes to stick to Chalcedonian Christology.149

Moreover, it is significant that Cassiodorus took care to underline the inte-gration of the gentes as concrete empirical entities. Psalm 44, a celebrated locus for the definition of the ecclesia because of its reminiscences to the Song of Songs, describes the gilded dress of Christ’s bride. As Cassiodorus explains, the golden threads denote the caritas which holds the community together, while the variety of materials from which the dress is made stands for the variety of languages spoken by the different gentes which come together in the church. It is precisely this ethnic diversity with its underlying unity (paralleled by a diver-sity of virtues and models of conduct for righteous individuals), which, accord-ing to Cassiodorus, accounts for the distinctive beauty of the church in the eyes of the Lord.150 There are numerous other passages throughout the Expositio

147 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxv. 3, p. 572: ‘audiamus quid Ecclesia gentes uno commate doceat dicere et magnam causam religionis sub breuitate con-cludere’ (cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 108); see, in a similar vein, the commentary on Psalm 4, esp. iv. concl., p. 62.

148 See the discussion of Psalms 67 and 106, above. Another succinct example is Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, xlix. 10–11, p. 446, where the gentes are compared to the beasts from the woods due to their superstitions, but are described as ‘beauty of the fields’ as soon as they become Christian.

149 For example: Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxv. 8, pp. 575–76: ‘Benedicite, gentes, Deum nostrum, et audite uocem laudis eius. Venit ad tertium membrum, in quo gentes monet ut Deum uerum consona praedicatione glorificent […]. Quam purissimis ac deuotis mentibus oportet audiri, ut unus atque idem credatur Dominus Christus, qui ante saecula ex Patre progenitus est consubstantialis ipis et ex Maria Virgine procreatus, nobis dignatus est fieri in assumpta humanitate consimilis. Sancta enim Ecclesia in hac fide proficit, ut in Domino Christo nec sine uera diuinitate humanitas, nec sine uera credatur humanitate diuinitas’. Cf. cvi. 20, pp. 978–79; civ. 40–43, pp. 985–86, where the depraved heretics are contrasted with the ‘uniuersalis ecclesia’, which they have chosen to abandon. Cf. Barnish, ‘Work of Cassiodorus’, pp. 188–65; O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, pp. 166–72.

150 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, xliv. 10, p. 410: ‘Adstetit regina a dextris tuis in uestitu deaurato, circumamicta uarietate […]. Addidit circumamicta uarietate. Perscrutemur cur Ecclesia Dei de uestis uarietate laudetur, cui totum simplex conuenit atque unum. Sed hic uarietatem, aut linguas multiplices significat, quia omnis gens secundum suam patriam in Ecclesia psallit auctori; aut uirtutum pulcherrimam diuersitatem. Ornatur enim auro apostolorum, argento prophetarum, gemmis uirginum, cocco martyrum, purpura paenitentium.


where the Christian church is carefully framed as an ecclesia composed ex diuer-sis gentibus, as opposed to an amorphous plurale tantum.151 All the gentes, with their respective populations, are offered the opportunity to convert and attain salvation: ‘All gentes in common are exhorted among their populations (in suis populis), so that none at the Lord’s judgement may claim that they were not included’.152 Every single gens is not only created by God, but destined to con-vert.153 Commenting on Psalm 71. 17 (‘And in him shall all the tribes [tribus] of the earth be blessed: all gentes shall magnify him’), Cassiodorus felt the need to underline that the psalmist’s aim was to include not only gentes subdivided into tribes, but all other gentes as well.154 His interest in the ethnic aspect of the gentes within a Christian framework becomes particularly clear with regard to Psalm 2. 8, which is otherwise famous for its Christological implications: ‘Ask of me, and I will give thee the gentes for thy inheritance’. Predictably, the

Ista est ergo uarietas unitatis, quae oculis Domini ex omnibus gentibus pia conuersatione placitura contexitur’.

151 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, xxv. 12, p. 234: ‘Nam quoties plurali numero dicuntur ecclesiae, mundi istius christiani populi significantur, qui de diuersis gentibus probantur esse collecti’; praef. 17, p. 23; iv. concl., p. 62; xxi. 25, p. 204; xxi. 29, p. 206; xliv. 10, p. 410; xlv. 4, p. 416; xlvii. 3, p. 426; lvi. 10, p. 512; lxv. tit., p. 571; lxxxi. tit., p. 757; lxxxvi. 4, p. 790, listing Rahab, Babylon, the alienigenae [Philistines], Tyrus, and Ethiopians as types of the ecclesia gentium, ‘significans per allusiones nominum eos de uariis gentibus colligendos’; cx. 1, p. 1015; cxvii. 10, p. 1051; cxxxiv. 4, p. 1215. With nationes: lix. 8, p. 533; cv. div., p. 958; cx. 6, p. 1017; viii. 2, p. 90 [with patria]; cf. xlvi. 9, p. 423, where all gentes/nationes form part of the celestial Jerusalem; cvii. 10, p. 990, where the populus christianus consists of diuersae gentes; cxxxviii. 18, p. 1251 [‘necesse enim fuit ut uincerat unam gentem numerositas aggregata nationum’]; cxlvii. 20, p. 1313 [‘religio christiana’]. Frequently, the universality of the church is formulated in territorial terms, which can also be combined with mentioning the gentes as its parts, cf. xlix. 10, p. 446; lxxi. 11, p. 654; xcv. 1, p. 862. In cvi. 34, p. 983, ‘Christiani’ are equated with the ‘euocatio gentium’; cf. for another example lxxxviii. 40, p. 816.

152 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cxvi. 1, p. 1046, commenting on Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes et collaudate eum, omnes populi (cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, iii, p. 160).

153 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxxv. 9, p. 784: ‘Omnes gentes quascumque fecisti uenient et adorabunt coram te, Domine, et honorificabunt nomen tuum […]. Dicendo enim: omnes gentes quascumque fecisti, absolute probat uniuersitatem: quia nulla gens existit, nisi quam plasmauit, sicut alibi dicit: Qui fecit caelum et terram, mare et omnia quae in eis sunt’.

154 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxi. 17. Cf. also lxvii. 33, p. 601; see below.

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text speaking of David’s contention with hostile peoples was used to describe the power Christ would wield over the gentes. The metaphor of the gentes as Christ’s heritage served to underline the special bond and intimate relationship between the gentes and their godly king; it shifted the attention of the readers towards a distinctly spiritual sphere. Nevertheless, Cassiodorus firmly located these gentes in the empirical world by recurring to an ‘ethnic’ definition of the term gens, already referred to at the beginning of this paper: ‘Gentes means the nations (nationes) divided across the whole world, who are all distinct and sep-arated, each being united by blood. For the word gens derives from genus’.155 These passages show that the Christian gentes remain just that, gentes in the ethnographical sense: their integration into a universal Christian community does not obliterate their particular and distinctive identities.

At times, Cassiodorus had to overcome considerable difficulties in order to establish this outcome. In contrast to the gentes acquired by David as his pos-session, those mentioned at the beginning of the psalm as raging against the king defied Christian redefinition: ‘Why have the gentes raged and the populi pondered vainly?’ (Psalm 2. 1). They thus needed to be differentiated from their New Testament counterparts. With considerable difficulty, Cassiodorus reversed the political and religious antagonism suggested by the verse, and took the gentes and populi to denote the Jews, who could then be described as lacking faith in Christ and understanding of the prophets. Arguing that the psalmist had used the plural in place of the singular as a figure of speech, Cassiodorus suggested that the Old Testament designation of the ‘anti-people of God’, gentes, in this case meant the ‘anti-people of God’ in the Christian sense, the Jews.156

Much as he exploited the tension between ethnic and religious aspects of the concept of gens in response to the necessity to reconcile Old Testament narratives and Christian interpretative concerns, Cassiodorus used the tension between political and spiritual meanings of kingship as a way to develop notions of the rulership of Christ and ecclesiastical leaders. ‘Kings’, he argued, ‘need not invariably denote men in the purple, for the term is applied also to those who have private status’. Like their political counterparts, the spiritual ‘masters of vices’ and ‘judges of the earth’ ‘impose the precepts of the law’ on their bod-

155 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, ii. 9, p. 46: ‘Gentes autem significat nationes toto orbe diuisas, quas distinctas ac separatas sanguis amplectitur. Gens enim a genere uocitatur’ (cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, pp. 56–57).

156 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, ii. 2, p. 41: ‘Nec illus nos moueat, cum apud Iudaeos ageretur, cur pluraliter gentes et populi positi esse uideantur’. Cassiodorus goes on to cite Acts 4. 27 in support of this interpretation.


ies, and take up a defensive shield, discipline.157 While drawing on the spiritual reinterpretation of the semantics of rulership, the political meaning resonates throughout the text: Christ’s power as a rex Iudaeorum needs careful comments so as to differentiate it from that of earthly kings, who are, after all, ‘chosen by God as well’.158 Merging the language of rulership and Christian ethics also brings about new moral responsibilities. Cassiodorus intertwined his discus-sion of kingship with anti-Arian arguments and concluded with an emphatic statement in favour of Chalcedonian orthodoxy.159 As he drily remarked else-where, not all reges gentium merit the title in its Christian sense. ‘For we see that many kings of the gentes are either subject to brute vices or marred by debased religious practice’, thus not fulfilling the requirement of being ‘men of religion and moderation’.160 On the other hand, as his comments on Psalm 71 show, conversion of kings also entailed the conversion of their regna and gentes:

And all the kings shall adore him: all nations (gentes) shall serve him. He passes to the fourth section, where he says that the Lord will be adored by all nations (gentes), and he subsequently expounds his kindness. By ‘all kings’ he wishes us to understand all nations (nationes); for there is no gens which does not at least in

157 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, ii. 11, pp. 47–48; Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, i, p. 65.

158 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, ii. 8, p. 45, for the appointment of other kings by God as well; for Christ’s kingship in contrast with worldly kingship see ii. 7 and 8, pp. 43–44, with Christ as rex Iudaeorum and ruler over the church; playfully using vocabulary such as tyrannus, potestas, uirga (as royal power and as correction of sins). Cf. also lxxi. 8, p. 652; lxxvii. 70–72, pp. 730–31. Cassiodorus applied this notion of self-government as a necessary characteristic of the ruler to king Theodahad, see Cassiodorus, Variae, ed. by Mommsen, x. 3, p. 299, and cf. Reydellet, La Royauté dans la littérature latine, p. 250.

159 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, ii. 8, pp. 44–45; concl., pp. 49–50.160 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cxxxvii. 4, p. 1239: ‘Reges terrae

sunt qui corporis suis diuinitatis munere dominantur. Nam ille rex uere non dicitur, qui uitiis seruire monstratur. Quod uero addidit, omnes, specialiter religiosos ac moderatos uiros designat, quando multos reges gentium uidemus aut uitiis feralibus subdi, aut praua religione maculari’. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, iii, p. 368. David, who, as a ‘purpuratus poenitens’, spoke Psalm 50 as a penitential prayer to account for his sin with Batsheba, was developed into a model of kingship: see Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, l. 6, p. 457: ‘Erat quippe in animo eius quod ex pastore rex fuisset effectus, quod regendos populos acceperat et sine honoris sui consideratione deliquerat’. But David was exemplary in that he valued spiritual discernment much more than his kingly power: ‘Rex ille sanctissimus et propheta mirabilis, non putabat praecipuum munus esse, subiectis iura dictare, nationes exteras bello subiugere; sed tota contemplatione translatus, curiosius expetebat in principali intellectu statui, quam in regni culmine contineri’ (l. 14, p. 463).

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some part of its population (in parte populi sui) adore its own Creator (auctor). And so that you would not think that he was speaking solely of kings, he added: ‘And all the nations (gentes) shall serve him’, that is, those who are differentiated by both language (linguae) and lands (patriae) throughout the whole world.161

Although Cassiodorus assumed a certain interchangeability between kings and gentes or nationes, thus suggesting the kings’ function as ‘catalysts of conver-sion’, he felt the need to re-emphasize that rulers and ruled, gentes and reges alike, come to faith in God. Once converted, this ‘metonymic relation’ between rex and gens was supposed to be superseded by that between the Christians and their king Christ.162 Christianity alters the relationship between a gens and its king: in Christian times, kings adore Christ instead of receiving undue hon-ours from their subjects. Elsewhere, Cassiodorus assured his readers that the conversion of kingdoms was not necessarily to be equated with their political downfall.163 When he explained the nature of Christ’s rule along the lines of Psalm 21, he commented on its consequences for Christian regna and gentes. The existence and fate of kingdoms was not determined by human agency, but subject to divine providence:

For the kingdom is the Lord’s: and he shall have dominion over the gentes. Let us observe what this reversal of order of the verses compels us to understand: God shall have dominion over the gentes, for the kingdom is the Lord’s. Kingdoms (regna) belong not to gentes, but to the Lord, who both changes and preserves kings by His power.164

161 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxi. 11, p. 654; Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 190.

162 See Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxi. 14, pp. 655–56; Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, ii, p. 191.

163 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, xlv. 7, p. 418: ‘Conturbatae sunt gentes et inclinata sunt regna […]. Sequitur et inclinata sunt regna, id est humiliata sunt ad adorandum, non ad cadendum’.

164 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, xxi. 29, p. 206: ‘Quoniam Domini est regnum et ipse dominabitur gentium. Intendamus quid iste uersus praeposteratus compellat intellegi: Deus dominabitur gentium, quoniam Dominum est regnum, quia non sunt gentium regna, sed Domini, qui potestate sua mutat reges et continet’ (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, i, p. 232). It is worth noting the precise wording; as Cassiodorus put it, the verse ‘compels’ us to draw this conclusion — yet it was his own choice to turn Christ’s reign (regnum) into his power not only over gentes, but specifically over a world of regna gentium. This was subsequently developed into an argument on Christ’s equality to the father, and in this context, it may be significant that all the lands (omnes patriae) who adored Christ in the previous verse, had to do so sincera fide.


In his commentaries, Cassiodorus was thus concerned with developing con-cepts of a Christian order that would contribute to an understanding of a world characterized by a plurality of Christian peoples and kingdoms. Mediated by both Israel and the ecclesia, the text of the Psalms is used as a template for think-ing about the providential significance and eschatological standing of the gen-tes, who, through the work of the exegete, become comparable to God’s cho-sen people of old. The specific ways in which Cassiodorus appropriated Israel (and the other Old Testament gentes) as a metaphor for God’s people and the terms in which he couched its Christianized version, allowed for the formula-tion of a Christian order into which the gentes were integrated as political and social units. This point deserves to be underlined once more by the example of Psalm 67, discussed above, which Cassiodorus used to develop a concept of a universal Christian church and its relation to the gentes. Commenting on Psalm 67. 33 (‘Sing to God, ye kingdoms of the earth, hymn ye the Lord’), Cassiodorus argued that by ‘all kingdoms of the earth’ (regna terrae), the text refers to all humans (omne genus humanum): ‘for though there are gentes with-out kings, the term embraces whatever kind of gens’.165 This passage is as sugges-tive as any for the degree to which the gentes had become a constitutive element of the Christianized social metaphor.

Conclusion: ‘Gens’ as a Social Metaphor

As I hope to have demonstrated with these examples, the concept of gens is associated throughout the Expositio psalmorum with a striking variety of dif-ferent groups. It can be used to designate biblical Israel, in its role as a people of God and as a historical community whose identity is as much defined by religious aspects as by political allegiance; Israel’s historical enemies, ranging from the Egyptians to the Romans; translated into a Christian context, we find it associated with the Christian religious antagonists, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics. As a concept for Christian communities, it mediates between the universal and the particular, designating a plurality of Christian peoples, which form part of the ecclesia and the new people of God; on a more abstract level, it

165 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxvii. 33, p. 601: ‘Regna terrae, cantate Deo, psallite Domino. Hanc quoque partem pulchra exhortatione conclusit. Dicens enim: Regna terrae, omne genus humanum significare uoluit; quia licet sint gentes quae non habeant reges, tamen hoc uerbo concluditur quidquid gentium esse sentitur’ (cf. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, trans. by Walsh, i, p. 138).

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can function to conceive of the Christians as a universal, and even as an escha-tological group.

This flexible usage in itself is very suggestive of the ‘elasticity’ of the con-cept. In order to understand the function of the term gens in Cassiodorus’s exegesis, it is important to take into account the dynamic of the metaphorical relationships into which it is inserted. Israel, as a gens, shares criteria of defini-tion, modes of belonging and aspects of its relationship with God with differ-ent kinds of Christian communities. While these various communities are not identical, some of them partially overlap; most importantly, all of them are con-nected through common characteristics and ideals. Mediated by Israel and the ecclesia, the gens in the singular and the gentes in the plural have a stake in the social metaphors developed from the Psalms. As a result of this interplay, gens is offered as a focus for Christian self-definition.

In conclusion, it is necessary to stress some of the implications and presup-positions of this ‘elastic vision’ of gens as a Christian concept of community. To a certain extent, gens remains anchored in its ethnographical context. As some of the examples cited show, the (Christian) gentes remain bound up with notions of common descent; these notions can be activated in order to charac-terize them as empirical and historical entities.166 But it is important to note that when offered as a point of identification within the framework of the uni-versal church, the gentes come with considerable potential for integration. As we have seen, in his comment on the relationship between Christ’s bride, the church, and the gentes in Psalm 44, Cassiodorus mentions patria and lingua as the distinctive criteria for a gens, leaving aside notions of common descent.167 Similarly, the gens in the explanation on Psalm 95 can explicitly include for-eigners, as opposed to the more narrowly defined natio.168 Moreover, there are numerous other cases where it is clear that when it comes down to it, moral and religious affiliation outweigh descent as a criterion for identity.169

166 Cf. the discussion above, pp. 188–190.167 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, xliv. 10, pp. 409–10. See above,

n. 150. Cf. lxxi. 11, p. 654: ‘omnes gentes seruient ei; scilicet quae per uniuersum mundum et linguis diuiduntur et patriis’.

168 Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, xcv. 7, p. 865; cf. above, p. 147.169 See Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxviii. 9, p. 609, where Christ

speaks about his relationship with the Jewish gens: ‘Matrem uero suam Synagogam dicit, de qua ortus est, dum in Iudaea gente nasci dignatus est. Filios ergo matris ipsos dicit, quos superius dixit et fratres. Sed isti filii, si fuissent ueri, non ut hospitem habuissent, sed ut fratrem carissimum suscepissent Dominum Christum’. In xlii. 1, p. 388, where the faithful speaker of


While, therefore, notions such as common descent and military power fre-quently associated with the gentes in historiographical and political discourse still play a role, their relative importance declines in favour of gens as a specifi-cally political concept. In pair with regna, the gentes emerge as constitutive ele-ments of the divinely sanctioned order, and as the focus for collective action. With regard to Israel as well as with regard to the gentes (both pagan and Chris-tian), Cassiodorus makes it very clear at numerous occasions that their legit-imacy as well as their political fate and identity is closely linked to religious affiliation. He frequently combines comments on the conversion of the gen-tes with strong calls for Christological orthodoxy as he saw it, and stresses the importance of righteous doctrine as a yardstick of just and legitimate rule.170 Thus, the religious definition of the gentes is complemented by a religious per-spective on political loyalty; gens and gentes encompass religious, political, and ‘ethnographical’ modes of definition.

The integration of gens/gentes into the metaphorical relationship between Israel and its Christian counterpart, and the semantic dynamic generated by the metaphorical process, effects a shift in perspective on the gentes. Through the exegetical engagement with Israel as a textual model, it becomes possible to conceive of the gentes as people(s) of God: a ‘re-scripted’ concept of gens is offered as one option for thinking about Christian communities and their coherence. With its implications of divine election, common destiny and unity, this concept acquires considerable affective appeal as a point of identification. It is in this sense that we, maybe, can think of the concept of gens itself as a ‘social metaphor’.

Undoubtedly, this was an idealistic notion. Shaped by both Israel as the his-torical example and the ecclesia as a frame for integration, the Christian gens is held together and defined by notions of (divine) law, rationality, liberty, mutual solidarity, and caritas. It is noteworthy that Cassiodorus underlined

the psalm begs to be judged differently from the unholy people, this ‘gens non sancta’ is defined as ‘perversi ac male uiuenti’. See xlvi. 10, p. 424, for the well-known distinction between the ‘semen Abrahae’ according to the flesh and according to faith.

170 Gentes and orthodoxy: e.g. Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, xxi. 29, p. 206; xcv. 7–8, pp. 865–66; xliii. 22, p. 400; lxxxv. 9, p. 784; ci. 23, pp. 909–10; cxvi. 1–2, pp. 1046–47; cxxxix. 7, pp. 1257–58; orthodoxy and rulership: l. 14, p. 463; cxxxvii. 4, p. 1239; xlv. 4, p. 417; cxxx. 1–2, pp. 1191–92. In the commentary on Psalm 71, passages describing the conversion of regna and gentes and their subjection to Christ as their king are combined with an elaborate discussion of Christ’s natures in the conclusion, see lxxi. concl., pp. 658–59. Compare also the commentaries on Psalms 21 and 2 (see above).

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much the same ideals of community in his portrayal of the regnum Italiae in the Variae.171 By being associated with some of the key concepts of Roman political thought (and its Christianized version), the Christian gens not only undercut the biblical contrast between the people of God and the pagan gentes, but also that between a Roman populus and the barbarian gentes. From a Christian per-spective, religious affiliation obliterated the boundary between Romans and gentes.172 At times, Cassiodorus even deliberately engages with the traditional repertory for ‘othering’ barbarian gentes, in order to draw different boundaries — frequently, religious ones.173 In his exegesis, Cassiodorus thus negotiated the salience of various, and sometimes conflicting, criteria for the perception and differentiation of communities. By subtly manoeuvring between religious and ethnic meanings, between biblical language and political vocabulary, he was concerned with redefining not only the semantic range of the term gens, but also the place of the gentes in the Christian world of the sixth century. He never straightforwardly identified any contemporary polity with the chosen people of Israel. Tellingly, he sometimes felt the need to restrict the potential of identi-fication inherent in the biblical stories, choosing a distinctly spiritual interpre-tation for psalms with strong martial imagery and stories about Israel fighting enemies with God by its side.174 At times with considerable effort, he managed to transform the notion of antagonism between Israel and the gentes into a more conciliatory attitude: Christians were supposed to think of these gentes as potentially Christian, and to aim for the conversion, rather than destruction, of their enemies.

Cassiodorus’s concern with reformulating the relationship between reli-gious affiliation, ethnicity, and political integration corresponds, I would sug-gest, to the contemporary need to redefine and reinterpret an increasingly

171 On the importance of concepts such as ratio, veritas, iustitia, and caritas in the Variae, see Kakridi, Cassiodors Variae, pp. 327–47; cf. Teillet, Des Goths à la nation gothique, pp. 289–90. On caritas and Christian ideals of community, see MacCormack, ‘Sin, Citizenship, and the Salvation of Souls’; Diesenberger, ‘Topographie und Gemeinschaft’.

172 See Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, lxxix. 13–14, p. 745; lxiv. 8, p. 566, where the gods of the pagan gentes, which prove ineffectual in contrast to the Christian faith, are those of the Greco-Roman pantheon; lxxiii. 3, p. 674: the Romans, associated with arrogance (superbia) and idolatry, turn from a ‘plebs superstitiosa’ into a ‘ciuitas sanctissima’.

173 For example, Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cxiii. 1, p. 1029; xlv. 11, pp. 419–20.

174 See, for example, the interpretation of Psalm 134: Cassiodorus, Expositio psalmorum, ed. by Adriaen, cxxiv, pp. 1213–22.


unstable contemporary world.175 In the Variae, Cassiodorus underlined the ‘Romanness’ of Gothic rule in order to establish the Gothic gens as a legiti-mate political player. In the Expositio psalmorum, it is the Christian perspective which allows for the formulation and legitimization of a social and political order characterized by a plurality of gentes. It is tempting to relate Cassiodorus’s exegesis to broader political discussions during the reign of Justinian. His views on gens as a Christian concept of community, and his emphasis on the church as a framework of integration, might have had a particular resonance in a time of intense debate about the relationship between the empire and the gentes, between Roman and Christian identities, and between religious and political authority. Certainly, they would not lose their relevance as a tool for orienta-tion in the decades to come.

175 The place of the Expositio psalmorum within contemporary debates certainly deserves further investigation, as does the question of the specificity of Cassiodorus’s exegetical choices in comparison with his sources. I hope to pursue these questions further in my dissertation, ‘Christentum und Ethnizität im Frühmittelalter: Die Exegese von Identität und Alterität im Psalmenkommentar des Cassiodor’ (Universität Wien, in preparation).

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