Vivarium (monastery)
Vivarium (also Monasterium Vivariense or Kloster Vivariense ) was a southern Italian scholarly monastery of the 6th century.
overview
The vivarium was founded around 554 by Cassiodorus , who was originally the minister of the Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great and who, after the conquest of the Ostrogothic Empire by the Byzantines, retired to his father's estate in Calabria to devote himself to philosophical studies. There, near the present-day community of Squillace near Catanzaro , Cassiodorus founded the Vivarium monastery, the exact location of which is no longer known. The monastery owes its name to the many fish tanks that were in the surrounding rocks. Cassiodorus made it the task of the monks working there with the study regulations Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum to collect and copy ancient literature, from church fathers as well as from philosophers, rhetors and poets. As far as this was available in Greek, he translated it himself into Latin. Thus, in addition to their previous role as a place of contemplation, the Western monasteries also received the status of educational institutions. Vivarium plays an important pioneering role here.
With his study regulations, Cassiodorus created one of the constitutive requirements for occidental schools. He saw vivarium as an educational community in which, following an intention of Cicero, he was also concerned with the realization of an idea of ideal naturalness. The formation of the individual took precedence over the formation of the community. The school practice in the monastery academy was formally based on the Ciceronian rhetoric of persuasion as an educational teaching approach. The educational intention of Cassiodor was in line with the objectives of the school of Nisibis .
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 in the Germanic successor states, the infrastructure and educational institutions that could have ensured the continued existence of the written culture collapsed in many places and only the clergy at the bishopric still had the appropriate basic knowledge, the Vivarium monastery formed the beginning the medieval monastery library system, with which knowledge of antiquity was “saved” into the later centuries.
The Vivarium monastery itself was dissolved again soon after Cassiodor's death (around 583), but analogue educational institutions based on his model were founded in the entire Latin-speaking area and stopped the loss of books in late antiquity .
See also
literature
- Georg Jenal : Italia ascetica atque monastica. The ascetics and monasticism in Italy from the beginnings to the time of the Lombards (approx. 150/250 - 604) (= monographs on the history of the Middle Ages, vol. 39, I / II ). Hiersemann, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-7772-9407-1 , p. 162-178; 221-224; 647-650; 657-661 .
- Günter Ludwig : Cassiodor. About the origin of the occidental school . Academic Publishing Company, Frankfurt a. M. 1967, chapter The founding of Vivarium , pp. 6–28
- Ulrich Schindel : News on the tradition of the library of the Vivarium monastery . In: International Journal of the Classical Tradition . tape 15 , no. 1 , p. 1-15 , doi : 10.1007 / S12138-008-0030-1 , JSTOR : 25691204 .
- Fabio Troncarelli : Vivarium. I libri, il destino (= Instrumenta Patristica; 33 ). Abatia Sancti Petri, Steenbruge 1998, ISBN 2-503-50676-3 (Italian).