Isidore of Seville

Isidore was born in Cartagena, Spain, a former Carthaginian colony, to Severianus and Theodora. Both Severianus and Theodora belonged to notable Hispano-Roman families of high social rank.[5] 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 Church celebrates 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 Catholic 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 Iberia during her lifetime.[6]

Isidore received his elementary education in the Cathedral school of Seville. In this institution, the first of its kind in Iberia, 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 Latin,[7] 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.

A statue of Isidore of Seville by José Alcoverro, 1892, outside the Biblioteca Nacional de España, in Madrid

Seville Cathedral. Sculpture by Lorenzo Mercadante de Bretaña

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.

Recognizing that the spiritual and material welfare of the people of his See depended on the assimilation of remnant Roman and ruling barbarian cultures, Isadore 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 centered 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.

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.

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.[8]

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.[9] The authority of the council made this education policy obligatory upon all bishops of the Kingdom of the Visigoths. The council granted 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.

Isidore of Seville died on 4 April 636 after serving more than 32 years as archbishop of Seville.

A page of Etymologiae, Carolingian manuscript (8th century), Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium

Isidori Hispalensis Opera Omnia (1797)

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.[10]

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.[11]

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"[12]—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".[13]

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.[14] The Etymologiae was much copied, particularly into medieval bestiaries.[15][16][17]

The medieval T-O map represents the inhabited world as described by Isidore in his Etymologiae.

Isidore's De fide catholica contra Iudaeos furthers Augustine of Hippo's ideas on the Jewish presence in Christian society. Like Augustine, Isidore accepted the necessity of the Jewish presence because of their expected role in the anticipated Second Coming of Christ. In De fide catholica contra Iudaeos, Isidore exceeds the anti-rabbinic polemics of earlier theologians by criticizing Jewish practice as deliberately disingenuous.[18]

He contributed two decisions to the Fourth Council of Toledo: Canon 60 calling for the forced removal of children from parents practising Crypto-Judaism and their education by Christians, and Canon 65 forbidding Jews and Christians of Jewish origin from holding public office.[19]

Isidore's authored more than a dozen major works on various topics including mathematics, holy scripture, and monastic life,[20] all in Latin:

• Historia de regibus Gothorum, Vandalorum et Suevorum, a history of the Gothic, Vandal and Suebi kings. The longer edition, issued in 624, includes the Laus Spaniae and the Laus Gothorum.
• Chronica Majora, a universal history
• De differentiis verborum, a brief theological treatise on the doctrine of the Trinity, the nature of Christ, of Paradise, angels, and men
• De natura rerum (On the Nature of Things), a book of astronomy and natural history dedicated to the Visigothic king Sisebut
• Questions on the Old Testament
• a mystical treatise on the allegorical meanings of numbers
• a number of brief letters
• Sententiae libri tres Codex Sang. 228; 9th century[21]
• De viris illustribus
• De ecclesiasticis officiis
• De summo bono

Chronica minora, 1482

• The Etymologiae (complete Latin text)
• Barney, Stephen A., Lewis, W.J., Beach, J.A. and Berghof, Oliver (translators). The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-521-83749-9, 978-0-521-83749-1.
• Ziolkowski, Vernon P., The De Fide Catholica contra Iudaeos of Saint Isidorus, Bishop, Book 1, Saint Louis University, PhD diss. (1982).
• Castro Caridad, Eva and Peña Fernández, Francisco (translators). "Isidoro de Sevilla. Sobre la fe católica contra los judíos". Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 2012. ISBN 978-84-472-1432-7.
• Throop, Priscilla, (translator). Isidore of Seville's Etymologies. Charlotte, VT: MedievalMS, 2005, 2 vols. ISBN 1-4116-6523-6, 978-1-4116-6523-1, 1-4116-6526-0
• Throop, Priscilla, (translator). Isidore's Synonyms and Differences. (a translation of Synonyms or Lamentations of a Sinful Soul, Book of Differences I, and Book of Differences II) Charlotte, VT: MedievalMS, 2012 (EPub ISBN 978-1-105-82667-2)
• Online Galleries, History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries High resolution images of works by Isidore of Seville in .jpg and .tiff format.
• De natura rerum (Msc.Nat.1) (On the Nature of Things) digitized by the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg.
• Lewis E 136 Carta pisana; Sententiae (Sentences) at OPenn
• Lewis E 137 Sententiae (Sentences) at OPenn
• MS 484/18 Quaestiones in josue, judicum, regum, machabeis at OPenn

• Henderson, John. The Medieval World of Isidore of Seville: Truth from Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 0-521-86740-1.
• Herren, Michael. "On the Earliest Irish Acquaintance with Isidore of Seville." Visigothic Spain: New Approaches. James, Edward (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-19-822543-1.
• Englisch, Brigitte. "Die Artes liberales im frühen Mittelalter." Stuttgart, 1994.
• Texts on Wikisource:
  • "Isidorus, archbp. of Seville". Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature to the End of the Sixth Century (3rd ed.). 1911.
  • "Isidore of Seville". Encyclopædia Britannica. 14 (11th ed.). 1911. pp. 871–872.
  • O'Connor, J.B. (1910). "St. Isidore of Seville". Catholic Encyclopedia. 8.

• The Order of Saint Isidore of Seville, st-isidore.org
• Jones, Peter. "Patron saint of the internet", telegraph.co.uk, 27 August 2006 (Review of The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, Cambridge University Press, 2006)
• Shachtman, Noah. "Searchin' for the Surfer's Saint", wired.com, 25 January 2002