Isidore of Seville · Lablypedia

At a time of disintegration of classical culture, 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 (Latin: Isidorus iunior), because of the earlier history purportedly written by Isidore of Córdoba.

Childhood and education

Isidore (Spanish pronunciation: ee-see-DOH-reh) was born in Cartago Spartaria (now Cartagena, Spain), a former Carthaginian colony, to a notable family in Roman Hispania, of high social rank, 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.

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.

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

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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.

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. 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.

Veneration

Isidore was one of the last of the ancient Christian philosophers and was contemporary with 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 said of him: "After so much destruction and so many disasters, God has raised him in recent times to restore the monuments of the ancients, so that we would not fall completely into barbarism".

The Eighth Council of Toledo (653) recorded its admiration of his character in these glowing terms: "The extraordinary doctor, the latest ornament of the Catholic Church, the most learned man of the latter ages, always to be named with reverence, Isidore". This tribute was endorsed by the Fifteenth Council of Toledo, held in 688. Isidore was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1722 by Pope Innocent XIII.

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. A Catholic poet described al-Mutatid placing a brocaded cover over Isidore's sarcophagus, and remarked, "Now you are leaving here, revered Isidore. You know well how much your fame was mine!" Ferdinand had 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.

Criticisms and contemporary appraisal

Contemporary researchers have criticised Isidore—specifically, his work in the Etymologies. The historian Sandro D'Onofrio has argued that "job consisted here and there of restating, recapitulating, and sometimes simply transliterating both data and theories that lacked research and originality".

In this view, Isidore—considering the large popularity his works enjoyed during the Middle Ages and the founding role he had in Scholasticism—would be less a brilliant thinker than a Christian gatekeeper making etymologies fit into the Christian worldview. "[H]e prescribed what they should mean," asserts D'Onofrio.

The researcher Victor Bruno has countered this argument. According to him, it was not the meaning of the Etymologies, or of Isidore's work as a whole, to give a scientific or philological account of the words, as a modern researcher would do. "It is obvious that, from a material point of view," argues Bruno, "Isidore's practical knowledge on etymology, geography, and history are considered outdated; his methods, from the current academic and scientific standpoint, are questionable, and some of his conclusions are indeed incorrect. But Isidore is less concerned about being etymologically or philologically right than being ontologically right." In Bruno's view, Isidore, despite living in the 6th and 7th centuries, is an archaic or "traditional" thinker. Being religiously inclined, Isidore would be concerned with the redeeming meaning of words and history, the ultimate quest of religions. The same researcher also found parallels between Isidore's interpretation of the word "year" (annus) and the meaning of the same words in the Jāiminīya-Upaniṣad-Brāmaṇa.

Honours

St. Isidore Island in Antarctica is named for him.