Isidore of Seville

Isidore was born about 560 in Cartagena, in southern Spain, into a family that had already been driven out of somewhere else. His parents died young. His older brother Leander raised him and later became archbishop of Seville; another brother, Fulgentius, became a bishop; his sister Florentina led a community of nuns. When Leander died about 600, Isidore took his chair and held it for roughly thirty-six years.

The Spain he governed in was a Visigothic kingdom that had only recently stopped being Arian. Leander had helped bring King Reccared over to Nicene Christianity in 589. Isidore spent his episcopate consolidating that: presiding at the Second Council of Seville in 619 and the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633, which ordered that every diocese in Spain must run a school teaching Greek and Hebrew, law, and medicine alongside Scripture.

He also used those councils to press for the forced baptism of Jews to be stopped, he argued that faith compelled is not faith, while at the same time refusing to let those already baptized return. It is a mixed record, and it is the record.

His great work is the Etymologiae, the Etymologies, twenty books long and unfinished when he died. It is an encyclopedia of everything: grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, medicine, law, chronology, theology, languages, cities, animals, ships, buildings, farm tools, food. He organized it by explaining where words came from, on the conviction that if you understand a word's origin you understand the thing. Much of it is compiled from older authors whose books were already disappearing.

That is the point. Isidore worked at the hinge where the classical world was going under. Libraries were burning or rotting. He copied what he could into one portable container and shipped it forward. For nearly a thousand years the Etymologiae was in every serious European library; something like a thousand medieval manuscripts survive, and it was among the earliest books to be printed.

He wrote much else: a history of the Goths, Vandals, and Suevi; a book on the nature of things; Sentences, the first systematic theology in Latin Spain; a monastic rule; works on the Old and New Testaments.

When he knew he was dying he had himself carried to the church of St. Vincent, put on sackcloth and ashes in front of the congregation, asked forgiveness, gave away what he owned, and went home. He died on 4 April 636.

Sources: Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae; Braulio of Zaragoza, Renotatio librorum Isidori; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).