Isidore of Seville (; 4 April 636) was a Hispano-Roman scholar, theologian and archbishop of Seville. He is widely regarded, in the words of the 19th-century historian Charles Forbes René de Montalembert, as "the last scholar of the ancient world".Montalembert, Charles F. Les Moines d'Occident depuis Saint Benoît jusqu'à Saint Bernard [The Monks of the West from Saint Benedict to Saint Bernard]. Paris: J. Lecoffre, 1860.
At a time of disintegration of classical culture,Jacques Fontaine, Isidore de Séville et la culture classique dans l'Espagne wisigothique (Paris) 1959 aristocratic violence, and widespread illiteracy, Isidore was involved in the conversion of the Arian Visigothic kings to Catholicism, both assisting his brother Leander of Seville and continuing after Leander's death. He was influential in the inner circle of Sisebut, Visigothic king of Hispania. Like Leander, he played a prominent role in the Councils of Toledo and Seville.
His fame after his death was based on his Etymologiae, an etymological encyclopedia that assembled extracts of many books from classical antiquity that would otherwise have been lost. This work also helped to standardise the use of the full stop, comma and colon.
Since the Early Middle Ages, Isidore has sometimes been called Isidore the Younger or Isidore Junior (), because of the earlier history purportedly written by Isidore of Córdoba.Bonnie J. Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, eds., in Florentius de Faxolis, Book on Music (Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 262.
Childhood and education Isidore ( ) was born in Cartago Spartaria (now Cartagena, Spain), a former Carthaginian colony, to a notable family in Roman Hispania, of high social rank,Priscilla Throop, Isidore of Seville's Etymologies: Complete English Translation. Vermont: MedievalMS, 2005, p. xi. His father was named Severianus and his mother Theodora. His parents were members of an influential family who were instrumental in the political-religious manoeuvring that converted the Visigothic kings from Arianism to Catholicism. The Catholic and Orthodox Churches celebrate him and all his siblings as known saints: An elder brother, Leander of Seville, immediately preceded Isidore as Archbishop of Seville and, while in office, opposed King Liuvigild. A younger brother, Fulgentius of Cartagena, served as the Bishop of Astigi at the start of the new reign of the Christian King Reccared. His sister, Florentina of Cartagena, was a nun who allegedly ruled over forty convents and one thousand consecrated religious. This claim seems unlikely, however, given the few functioning monastic institutions in Spania during her lifetime.Roger Collins, Early Medieval Spain. New York: St Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 79–86.
Isidore received his elementary education in the Cathedral school of Seville. In this institution, the first of its kind in Spania, a body of learned men including Archbishop Leander of Seville taught the trivium and quadrivium, the classic liberal arts. Isidore applied himself to study diligently enough that he quickly mastered classical Latin,"His literary style, though lucid, is pedestrian": Katherine Nell MacFarlane's observation, in "Isidore of Seville on the Pagan Gods (Origines VIII. 11)", Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 70.3 (1980):1–40, p. 4, reflects mainstream secular opinion. and acquired some Greek and Hebrew.
Two centuries of Gothic control of Iberia incrementally suppressed the ancient institutions, classical learning, and manners of the Roman Empire. The associated culture entered a period of long-term decline. The ruling Visigoths nevertheless showed some respect for the outward trappings of Roman culture. Arianism meanwhile took deep root among the Visigoths as the form of Christianity that they received.
Scholars may debate whether Isidore ever personally embraced monastic life or affiliated with any religious order, but he undoubtedly esteemed the monks highly.
Bishop of Seville
After the death of Leander of Seville on 13 March 600 or 601, Isidore succeeded to the See of Seville. On his elevation to the episcopate, he immediately constituted himself as the protector of monks.
Recognising that the spiritual and material welfare of the people of his see depended on the assimilation of remnant Roman and ruling barbarian cultures, Isidore attempted to weld the peoples and subcultures of the Visigothic kingdom into a united nation. He used all available religious resources toward this end and succeeded. Isidore practically eradicated the heresy of Arianism and completely stifled the new heresy of Acephali at its outset. Archbishop Isidore strengthened religious discipline throughout his see.
Archbishop Isidore also used resources of education to counteract increasingly influential Gothic barbarism throughout his episcopal jurisdiction. His quickening spirit animated the educational movement centred on Seville. Isidore introduced his countrymen to Aristotle long before the Arabs studied Greek philosophy extensively.
In 619 Isidore of Seville pronounced anathema against any ecclesiastic who in any way should molest the monasteries.
Second Synod of Seville (November 619)
Isidore presided over the Second Council of Seville, begun on 13 November 619 in the reign of King Sisebut, a provincial council attended by eight other bishops, all from the ecclesiastical province of Baetica in southern Spain. The Acts of the Council fully set forth the nature of Christ, countering the conceptions of Gregory, a Syrian representing the heretical Acephali.
Third Synod of Seville (624) Based on a few surviving canons found in the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, Isidore is known to have presided over an additional provincial council around 624.
The council dealt with a conflict over the See of Écija and wrongfully stripped bishop Martianus of his see, a situation that was rectified by the Fourth Council of Toledo. It also addressed a concern over Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity.
The records of the council, unlike the First and Second Councils of Seville, were not preserved in the Hispana, a collection of canons and decretals likely edited by Isidore himself.Rachel Stocking, "Martianus, Aventius and Isidore: provincial councils in seventh-century Spain" Early Medieval Europe 6 (1997) 169–188.
Fourth National Council of Toledo
All bishops of Hispania attended the Fourth National Council of Toledo, begun on 5 December 633. The aged Archbishop Isidore presided over its deliberations and originated most enactments of the council.
Through Isidore's influence, this Council of Toledo promulgated a decree commanding all bishops to establish seminaries in their cathedral cities along the lines of the cathedral school at Seville, which had educated Isidore decades earlier. The decree prescribed the study of Greek, Hebrew, and the liberal arts and encouraged interest in law and medicine.Isidore's own work regarding medicine is examined by The authority of the council made this education policy obligatory upon all bishops of the Kingdom of the Visigoths. The council granted a remarkable position and deference to the king of the Visigoths. The independent Church bound itself in allegiance to the acknowledged king; it said nothing of allegiance to the Bishop of Rome.
Death Isidore of Seville died on 4 April 636 after serving more than 32 years as archbishop of Seville.
Works
Isidore's Latin style in the Etymologiae and elsewhere, though simple and lucid, reveals increasing local Visigothic traditions.
Etymologiae
Isidore was the first Christian writer to try to compile a summa of universal knowledge, in his most important work, the Etymologiae (taking its title from the method he uncritically used in the transcription of his era's knowledge). It is also known by classicists as the Origines (the standard abbreviation being Orig.). This encyclopedia—the first such Christian epitome—formed a huge compilation of 448 chapters in 20 volumes.MacFarlane 1980:4; MacFarlane translates Etymologiae viii.
In it, Isidore entered his own terse digest of Roman handbooks, miscellanies and compendia. He continued the trend towards abridgements and summaries that had characterised Roman learning in late antiquity. In the process, many fragments of classical learning are preserved that otherwise would have been hopelessly lost; "in fact, in the majority of his works, including the Origines, he contributes little more than the mortar which connects excerpts from other authors, as if he was aware of his deficiencies and had more confidence in the stilus maiorum than his own", his translator Katherine Nell MacFarlane remarks.
Some of these fragments were lost in the first place because Isidore's work was so highly regarded—Braulio called it quaecunque fere sciri debentur, "practically everything that it is necessary to know"Braulio, Elogium of Isidore appended to Isidore's De viris illustribus, heavily indebted itself to Jerome.—that it superseded the use of many individual works of the classics themselves, which were not recopied and have therefore been lost: "all secular knowledge that was of use to the Christian scholar had been winnowed out and contained in one handy volume; the scholar need search no further".MacFarlane 1980:4.
Book VIII of the Etymologiae covers religion, including the Christian Church, Judaism, heretical sects, pagan philosophers, sibyls, and magi. In this section, Isidore documents pre-Christian religious and magical beliefs, preserving knowledge about ancient magical practices, even while condemning them as superstition. His writings serve as one of the few surviving records of magical thought in early medieval Europe, helping to transmit classical esoteric ideas into the Middle Ages.
The fame of this work imparted a new impetus to encyclopedic writing, which bore abundant fruit in the subsequent centuries of the Middle Ages. It was the most popular compendium in medieval libraries. It was printed in at least ten editions between 1470 and 1530, showing Isidore's continued popularity in the Renaissance. Until the 12th century brought translations from Arabic sources, Isidore transmitted what western Europeans remembered of the works of Aristotle and other Greeks, although he understood only a limited amount of Greek. The Etymologiae was much copied, particularly into medieval bestiaries.
On the Catholic Faith against the Jews
Isidore's De fide catholica contra Iudaeos furthers Augustine of Hippo's ideas on the Jewish presence in the Christian society of the ancient world. Like Augustine, Isidore held an acceptance of the Jewish presence as necessary to society because of their expected role in the anticipated Second Coming of Christ.
But Isidore had access to Augustine's works, out of which one finds more than forced acceptance of but rather broader reasons than just an endtime role for Jews in society:
[D]iversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained [are not scrupled in the heavenly city for which we strive, while its citizens sojourn on earth], but recognizing that, however various they are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace.
[The heavenly city] is therefore so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adopts them, so long only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced...and makes this earthly peace bear upon the peace of heaven; for this alone can be truly called and esteemed the peace of the reasonable creatures, consisting as it does in the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God. (City of God, Book 19, Chapter 17)Marcus Dods, translator.