ST. ISIDORE OF SEVILLE (APRIL 4TH)

St. Isidore of Seville, AD 560 - 636

Edited by Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West) 

St. 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. 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, St. Leander of Seville, immediately preceded Isidore as Archbishop of Seville and, while in office, opposed King Liuvigild. A younger brother, St. Fulgentius of Cartagena, served as the Bishop of Astigi at the start of the new reign of the Catholic King Reccared. His sister, St. Florentina of Cartagena, was a nun who allegedly ruled over forty convents and one thousand consecrated religious. 

St. 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 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.

A Contemporary American Icon of St. Leander of Seville, Archbishop and Defender of Orthodoxy

Scholars may debate whether Isidore ever personally embraced monastic life or affiliated with any religious order, but he undoubtedly esteemed the monks highly.

After the death of St. Leander of Seville on 13 March 600 or 601, St. 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, St. 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 centered on Seville. St. Isidore introduced his countrymen to Aristotle long before the Arabs studied Greek philosophy extensively.

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 St. 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. 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. The later Roman desire to undermine this independence is seen in the creation of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. 

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

Academic Influence 

St. 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.

In it, St. Isidore entered his own terse digest of Roman handbooks, miscellanies and compendia, he continued the trend towards abridgements and summaries that had characterized 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.

12th Century Latin Manuscript Illustration of St. Isidore of Seville 

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"—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".

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 St. Isidore's continued popularity in the Renaissance. Until the 12th century brought translations from Arabic sources, St. 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.

The World According to St. Isidore

The Opera Omnia by St. Isidore

The Etymology of the World by St. Isidore, "Containing All Necessary Knowledge for Life..."

St. Isidore's authored more than a dozen major works on various topics including mathematics, holy scripture, and monastic life, 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

De viris illustribus

De ecclesiasticis officiis

De summo bono

De ortu et obitu patrum

Veneration

St. Isidore was one of the last of the ancient Christian philosophers and was contemporary with St. Maximus the Confessor. He has been called the most learned man of his age by some scholars, and he exercised a far-reaching and immeasurable influence on the educational life of the Middle Ages. His contemporary and friend, Braulio of Zaragoza, regarded him as a man raised up by God to save the Iberian peoples from the tidal wave of barbarism that threatened to inundate the ancient civilization of Hispania. 

St. Isidore was interred in Seville. His tomb represented an important place of veneration for the Mozarabs during the centuries after the Arab conquest of Visigothic Hispania. In the middle of the 11th century, with the division of Al Andalus into taifas and the strengthening of the Christian holdings in the Iberian Peninsula, Ferdinand I of León and Castile found himself in a position to extract tribute from the fractured Arab states. In addition to money, Abbad II al-Mu'tadid, the Abbadid ruler of Seville (1042–1069), agreed to turn over St. Isidore's remains to Ferdinand I. Ferdinand had St. Isidore's remains reinterred in the then-recently constructed Basilica of San Isidoro in León. Today, many of his bones are buried in the cathedral of Murcia, Spain.

St. Isidore of Seville from the Outer Facade of the Cathedral of Seville, Carved in the late 1600's

(Text edited by Bp. Joseph from the Wikipedia entry on St. Isidore of Seville)