Saint Isidore of Seville (560-636)

The last scholar of the ancient world

Isidore lives at a hinge of history. In the West, the Roman Empire collapsed more than a century ago; the barbarian kingdoms — here, that of the Arian Visigoths settled in Spain — are painfully piecing together a new order. Ancient culture, its libraries, its schools, its sciences, threatens to sink into oblivion. It is in this fragile world that Isidore sets himself a mission: to save knowledge before it disappears, and to hand it on to generations that can barely read Greek any more.

The French historian Montalembert summed up this position in a formula that has remained famous: Isidore is "the last scholar of the ancient world"^[3]. After him, the West enters the dark centuries; and when it wishes to learn again, it is from Isidore's books that it will draw. His friend Braulio of Zaragoza was already saying so in his lifetime, with gratitude:

"After so many disasters in Spain, God raised him up in our own days to restore the monuments of the ancients, so that we would not sink entirely into barbarism." — Braulio of Zaragoza, Renotatio librorum domini Isidori^[4]

Saint, Father and Doctor of the Church

Like Leo the Great before him, Isidore combines the three great titles the Church reserves for her masters: he is a saint (canonized in 1598), a Father of the Church (the last of the Latin Fathers) and a Doctor of the Church (proclaimed as such by Innocent XIII in 1722)^[5]. He belongs to the great line of Latin doctors who follow Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and Gregory the Great: he gathers their whole heritage and condenses it in order to save it.

An authority constantly reaffirmed

Only a few years after his death, the Eighth Council of Toledo (653) celebrates him in solemn terms as "the extraordinary doctor, the latest ornament of the Catholic Church, the most learned man of the latter ages"^[6]. Seven centuries later, Dante will place his soul in the Heaven of the Sun, among the wise spirits, alongside Bede the Venerable:

"See, beyond, the burning breath / of Isidore, of Bede, and of Richard / who in contemplation was more than man." — Dante, Paradise, canto X, vv. 130-132^[7]

Birth at Cartagena, in Visigothic Spain

Isidore is born around 560, probably at Cartagena (Carthago Nova), into a high-ranking Hispano-Roman family, deeply Christian. His father's name was Severianus, his mother's Theodora^[8]. The family had to leave Cartagena for Seville, no doubt because of the political troubles shaking Spain, divided between the Arian Visigoths and the Byzantine outposts.

It is an age of religious struggle: most of the Visigothic nobility professes Arianism, which denies the full divinity of Christ. The conversion of King Reccared to Catholicism, at the Third Council of Toledo (589), will change the destiny of Spain — and Isidore's family will be at the heart of this Catholic reconquest.

The four saints of Cartagena

Isidore's case is unique in the history of the Church: he is one of four children of the same family all venerated as saints, what is sometimes called "the four saints of Cartagena"^[9] :

This family is not a hagiographical curiosity: it explains Isidore. It is in this home, and under the guidance of his elder brother, that he received both militant Catholic faith and the taste for study.

Education by his brother Leander

Isidore's father died while he was still young, and it was his elder brother, Saint Leander, already engaged in monastic life and later Archbishop of Seville, who took charge of his education^[10]. Tradition reports that Leander was a demanding, sometimes severe master, and that Isidore, discouraged, nearly fled the school — before returning and giving himself wholly to study.

Leander was the friend of saint Gregory the Great, whom he had met at Constantinople; it was at Leander's request that Gregory composed his famous Moralia in Job. Isidore thus grew up in a circle in contact with the most living forces of Christendom at the time. At the cathedral school of Seville, he learns Latin, elements of Greek and Hebrew, and trains in all the disciplines of his age^[11].

Successor of his brother on the see of Seville

Upon Leander's death, around 600-601, Isidore succeeds him as Archbishop (metropolitan) of Seville^[12]. He will govern this see for more than thirty years, until his death. Like Leo the Great, he was a pastor whose holiness was worked out not only in books, but in the daily government of a Church, in preaching, in care for the poor and in the fight against heresy.

The pastor and organizer of councils

Visigothic Spain invented a remarkable institution: the Councils of Toledo, a kind of national assemblies where bishops and great men of the realm legislate together for the Church and for society. Isidore played a leading role in them.

The Second Council of Seville (619)

He first presides over the Second Council of Seville, opened on 13 November 619, which settles questions of discipline and refutes the positions of the Arian bishops still present^[13]. Isidore already appears there as the doctrinal authority of the Church in Spain.

The Fourth Council of Toledo (633)

His masterpiece as a pastor is the Fourth Council of Toledo, opened on 5 December 633. "Though far advanced in years, Saint Isidore presided over its deliberations and was the originator of most of its enactments"^[14]. This council is one of the most important in the history of Christian Spain. It decides in particular:

• liturgical unity for the kingdom: one same rite, one same order of offices for all the Churches of Spain and Narbonese Gaul;
• the reform of education: the obligation, for every diocese, to maintain an episcopal school teaching the liberal arts, Greek, Hebrew, law and medicine — the direct ancestor of seminaries and cathedral schools^[15];
• measures on the discipline of the clergy and the liturgy.

This council also contains severe canons concerning the Jews, in the context of King Sisenand's policy. Honesty requires it: Isidore himself, in his treatise De fide catholica contra Iudaeos, belongs to the anti-Jewish polemic of his time. It must be read in its historical context — that of a Europe which had not yet worked out the doctrine of religious freedom —, without anachronistically projecting modern categories onto it, but without concealing this shadow either. Note, however, that Isidore opposes forced conversions: faith, for him, must be embraced freely, by persuasion and not by constraint^[16].

The reformer of education

The decree of the Fourth Council of Toledo on episcopal schools is not one administrative measure among others: it expresses Isidore's great intuition. He understood that, in a collapsing world, saving the faith means saving the culture that makes it possible to understand and hand it on. Without an instructed clergy, no solid preaching; without schools, no books; without books, oblivion. Isidore was thus, through his councils as through his work, one of the great educators of the Christian West.

The Etymologies, the encyclopedia of the Middle Ages

Isidore's masterwork is an encyclopedia in twenty books, the Etymologies (Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX), left unfinished at his death and put in order by his friend Braulio^[17]. In it Isidore undertakes to gather all the knowledge of antiquity — grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, medicine, law, theology, cosmology, geography, history, languages, agriculture, tools, down to furniture and clothing — starting from etymology (the origin and meaning of words), because, for him, to know the origin of a word is to begin to know the reality it denotes.

"Knowledge of things is often drawn from the etymology of their names." — Saint Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, book I^[18]

For almost the whole of the Middle Ages, the Etymologies were "the textbook most in use in educational institutions"^[19]. Nearly a thousand manuscripts of it survive: no secular work, apart from the Bible, was so often copied^[20]. It is through Isidore that medieval Europe came to know a large part of its ancient heritage.

An encyclopedia at the service of faith

It would be wrong to see in the Etymologies a mere scholar's compilation. For Isidore, all knowledge converges toward God. Grammar and the liberal arts are steps leading to the understanding of Scripture; history is the history of salvation; nature itself is a book in which the wisdom of the Creator can be read. His short treatise De natura rerum ("On the nature of things"), dedicated to King Sisebut, explains natural phenomena — eclipses, tides, seasons — without superstition, but always so as to lead the reader to praise God^[21]. Isidore is a believing scholar, never a secular scholar: that is what makes him a Father of the Church and not a mere compiler.

Braulio of Zaragoza, the friend and editor

Isidore's work would not have come down to us in this state without Saint Braulio of Zaragoza (died 651), his disciple and friend. It is Braulio who urged Isidore to complete the Etymologies, who divided them into twenty books after the master's death, and who drew up the first catalogue of his works in his Renotatio librorum domini Isidori^[22]. Without this studious friendship, part of the memory of the West would have been lost.

The other works

Isidore was prodigiously fruitful. Besides the Etymologies, notable works include:

The Sentences (Sententiae) are particularly important: they form the first systematic textbook of theology in the Latin West, a distant model for the great medieval Summae. It is there, and in the Synonyma, that Isidore's spiritual heart is to be found.

This is where the saint reveals himself most: not in erudition, but in the way he teaches the Christian soul to seek God.

Prayer and reading: a dialogue with God

Isidore's spirituality rests first on a simple and luminous intuition: the Christian life is a two-voiced dialogue between the soul and God, in which prayer and reading (lectio divina) answer one another.

"If anyone wishes to be always with God, he must pray often and read often. For when we pray, it is we who speak to God; but when we read, it is God who speaks to us." — Saint Isidore of Seville, Sentences, book III, 8^[24]

This sentence crossed the entire Middle Ages; it sums up Isidore's conviction that study is not the enemy of prayer, but its sister. To read Scripture and the Fathers, for him, is not to accumulate knowledge: it is to place oneself in listening to God who speaks. That is why a learned bishop like him could at the same time be a man of prayer: his books and his prayer were but one single movement toward God.

The soul's combat: the Synonyma

Isidore's other great spiritual text is the Synonyma, also called the Lamentations of the Sinful Soul. It is a striking dialogue: Man (Homo), crushed by his faults and by misfortune, collapses in lamentations; Reason (Ratio) answers him, raises him up, and leads him step by step from desolation to hope and conversion.

"My soul is in anguish, my spirit is on fire, my heart is overwhelmed with sorrow… On every side sorrows besiege me, on every side fear and dread." — Saint Isidore of Seville, Synonyma, book I^[25]

This book met with immense success, because it puts words to the universal experience of the soul that knows itself sinful and seeks to rise again. Isidore does not lecture from above: he descends into man's distress to show him the way back. It is a spirituality of compunction — that salutary sorrow for sin which, instead of crushing, opens the way to mercy.

Conversion, mercy and humility

Isidore's whole spiritual doctrine is crossed by the call to conversion of heart and to mercy. In the Sentences, he insists that knowledge without charity puffs up with pride, and that true knowledge is what makes one humble and good. The most erudite scholar of his time never ceased to recall that wisdom is not the accumulation of learning, but the fear of God and love of neighbor. His own death would prove it.

The last days and public penance

The account of Isidore's death is one of the most beautiful in ancient hagiography. Feeling his end draw near, the old archbishop — the most learned and most respected man in all Spain — wished to die not as a prince of the Church, but as a penitent. He had himself carried to the church, before the assembled people; he put on sackcloth and ashes, signs of public penance; he asked forgiveness, prayed, and distributed to the poor all that remained to him^[26].

This gesture sums up his holiness better than all his books. The doctor who had wished to gather all the knowledge of the world departed empty-handed, poor among the poor, in the attitude of the publican of the Gospel who dares not lift his eyes and beats his breast. Isidore's wisdom ended where it had begun: in the fear of God and humility.

Death on 4 April 636

Isidore dies at Seville on 4 April 636, after more than thirty years as bishop^[27]. He leaves behind a Church of Spain strengthened in the Catholic faith, an instructed clergy, and a work that would nourish the West for a thousand years. His death was at once surrounded by veneration as a saint.

The translation of the relics to León (1063)

In the eleventh century, northern Spain gradually reconquers the territory held by the Muslims. In 1063, King Ferdinand I of León and Castile obtains from the king of Seville the surrender of Saint Isidore's relics, which are solemnly transferred to León^[28]. A church is raised there to receive them, which will become the magnificent royal collegiate basilica of San Isidoro de León, one of the jewels of Spanish Romanesque art, where the saint is still venerated today.

Canonization (1598) and Doctor of the Church (1722)

Venerated as a saint since the Middle Ages, Isidore is canonized by Pope Clement VIII in 1598^[29]. More than a century later, Pope Innocent XIII raises him to the dignity of Doctor of the Church, in 1722^[30] — the consecration of the depth and influence of his teaching. He takes his place among the Doctors of the Church, alongside the great Latin Fathers whose last heir he was.

Dante and the memory of the centuries

Isidore's glory has never faded. In the fourteenth century, Dante brings him into his Paradise, in the Heaven of the Sun, among the twelve wise spirits presented by Saint Thomas Aquinas — alongside Boethius, Bede the Venerable and Solomon^[31]. For the greatest poet of Christendom, Isidore definitively belonged to the choir of the masters of wisdom.

Patron saint of the Internet?

An unexpected popularity has returned to Isidore in the digital age. Because he had wished, in his Etymologies, to gather and connect all knowledge in an immense network of cross-references, he has been compared to a distant ancestor of the Internet and of databases. In 1999, at the request of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, a body proposed his name as a possible protector of the Internet and of computer scientists^[32]. One must be precise: this patronage has remained purely unofficial and devotional — no pontifical decision followed, and no act of the Holy See has ever proclaimed him patron of the Internet. But the custom has spread, and it says something true: the saint who wished to save the knowledge of a crumbling world remains a model for those who, today, handle information.

The liturgical feast

Saint Isidore speaks to our time. He too lived in a world crossed by the collapse of a civilization and the fear of losing everything; and he did not answer this anguish by withdrawal, but by patient work of transmission: saving knowledge, instructing the clergy, relating all learning to its source in God. In the age of information overload, he recalls that knowledge has value only if it makes one humbler and closer to God.

Above all he teaches that study and prayer are not opposed: "when we pray, it is we who speak to God; when we read, it is God who speaks to us." The most erudite of saints died as a penitent, stripped of everything, his hands stretched out to the poor and his heart turned toward God. For this the Church made him saint, Father and Doctor; for this one may still place oneself in his school.

"Wisdom is to know God and to do good; and he is truly learned who knows himself a sinner before God." — after Saint Isidore of Seville, Sentences^[44]

• Saint Leo the Great (390-461) — the other great pastor-doctor of Latin antiquity, "the doctor of the Incarnation".
• Saint Gregory the Great (540-604) — friend of Leander, one of the four great Latin Doctors.
• Saint Bede the Venerable (672-735) — another learned monk placed by Dante in the Heaven of the Sun with Isidore.
• Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) — the great source from which Isidore gathers the doctrinal heritage.
• Saint Jerome (345-420) — the first of the great Latin scholars, whose work of transmission Isidore carries on.
• The Doctors of the Church in history — the category of Doctors to which Isidore has belonged since 1722.